U.S. Holiday Trivia
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100 free U.S. Holiday trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This quiz covers the holidays Americans actually get off work and the ones they celebrate anyway: the federal holidays from New Year's Day to Christmas, the observances Congress named but never closed the banks for, and the state-only days like Utah's Pioneer Day, Illinois' Casimir Pulaski Day and Nevada Day. Expect questions on how each holiday started, who lobbied for it, which president signed it and the odd traditions that grew up around it, from the turkey pardon to the Chicago River. It is written for anyone hosting a July 4th, Thanksgiving or office holiday quiz, for teachers who want a civics-flavoured round, and for trivia players who know the dates but not the stories. The questions run from easy (which day is Groundhog Day?) to genuinely hard (which town did Congress name the birthplace of Memorial Day?), so a group of mixed ages can play together. Every answer was checked against a primary or encyclopaedic source, and each question carries a citation you can open, so you can settle arguments at the table.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01A federal holiday on a Saturday is observed when?
The Friday before
The Friday before becomes the day off for most federal workers, and a Sunday holiday moves to Monday, so a weekend never swallows any of the eleven federal holidays.
Q 02Which federal holiday did the Uniform Monday Holiday Act create?
Columbus Day
Columbus Day joined the federal calendar under the act, which took effect in 1971 and shifted older holidays to Mondays to give federal workers more three-day weekends.
Q 03Which day is a paid holiday only for federal employees who work in the Washington, D.C. area?
Inauguration Day
Inauguration Day became a capital-area holiday in 1957, after a congressman argued the festivities would make it too hard for workers to reach their desks; federal staff elsewhere work as usual.
Q 04What is the official federal name of the February holiday most Americans call Presidents' Day?
Washington's Birthday
Washington's Birthday is still its name in federal law: Congress never renamed it, and 'Presidents' Day' spread through state laws and advertisers after the holiday moved to a Monday in 1971.
Q 05Each year, a senator reads aloud which of George Washington's writings?
Farewell Address
The Farewell Address was first read to Congress in 1862, after citizens petitioned for it to mark the 130th anniversary of his birth, and the Senate later made the reading a yearly custom.
Q 06Which president signed the bill that created Martin Luther King Jr. Day?
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan signed it in 1983 after first opposing a federal holiday, and it was first observed in January 1986; not until 2000 did every state mark the day.
Q 07Which musician wrote the song 'Happy Birthday' as part of the campaign for a King holiday?
Stevie Wonder
Stevie Wonder put it on his 1980 album Hotter than July, then helped Coretta Scott King deliver a petition of more than six million signatures to Congress before the holiday bill passed.
Q 08After voters rejected a King holiday in 1990, the NFL pulled Super Bowl XXVII from which state?
Arizona
Arizona lost the game to Pasadena, California, then won one back: voters approved the holiday in 1992 and the state hosted the Super Bowl in 1996.
Q 09Juneteenth marks the 1865 day a Union general's order announced freedom in which Texas city?
Galveston
Galveston is where Major General Gordon Granger arrived with some 2,000 troops to enforce an Emancipation Proclamation that was by then two and a half years old.
Q 10Which president signed the law that made Juneteenth a federal holiday?
Joe Biden
Joe Biden signed it on June 17, 2021, and federal workers got their first Juneteenth holiday the very next day.
Q 11Which activist, called the 'grandmother of Juneteenth', set out on foot from Fort Worth for Washington at 89?
Opal Lee
Opal Lee began the walk in September 2016 to ask for a federal holiday, and five years later she was a guest of honor when the Juneteenth law was signed.
Q 12Whose years of editorials prompted Abraham Lincoln to proclaim a national Thanksgiving in 1863?
Sarah Josepha Hale
Sarah Josepha Hale, the magazine editor credited with 'Mary Had a Little Lamb', wrote to one president after another until Lincoln agreed and set the last Thursday of November.
Q 13What did critics nickname the 1939 Thanksgiving after Roosevelt moved it a week earlier?
Franksgiving
Q 21Which Founding Father wrote to his wife that 'the second day of July' would be America's great anniversary?
John Adams
John Adams was thinking of the day Congress voted for independence; the country chose the date on the Declaration instead, and Adams and Jefferson both died on its 50th anniversary in 1826.
Q 22The United States chose July 4, 1946 to grant independence to which country?
The Philippines
The Philippines kept July 4 as its own Independence Day until 1962, when it switched to June 12 to honor its 1898 declaration of independence from Spain.
Q 23Which small town claims the country's oldest continuous Independence Day celebration, since 1785?
Bristol, Rhode Island
Franksgiving mocked Franklin Roosevelt's change, and so many states kept the old date that Americans carved their turkeys on two different Thursdays until Congress settled the matter.
Q 14President Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving a week earlier in 1939 hoping to help which group?
Retailers
Retailers had feared a short Christmas shopping season in a year when November had five Thursdays; Congress ended the rival dates in 1941 by fixing the fourth Thursday in law.
Q 15Which NFL team has hosted a game every Thanksgiving Day since 1945, after also doing so in the mid-1930s?
Detroit Lions
The Detroit Lions' first owner, George A. Richards, also owned a big radio station and got NBC to carry the game live across its network, a gimmick to draw fans; Dallas joined the holiday slate in 1966.
Q 16What replaced live zoo animals in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in 1927?
Giant balloons
Giant balloons, starting with Felix the Cat, took over from animals borrowed from the Central Park Zoo; the parade later paused from 1942 to 1944 because rubber and helium were needed for the war.
Q 17Which president made the annual turkey 'pardon' a permanent Thanksgiving tradition in 1989?
George H. W. Bush
George H. W. Bush made the reprieve an official yearly ritual in his first Thanksgiving in office; in the ceremony's early decades, presidents usually ate the turkeys they were given.
Q 18Which president first received an official National Turkey Federation Thanksgiving turkey, in 1947?
Harry S. Truman
Harry S. Truman's turkey was a poultry-industry promotion, not a pardon; John F. Kennedy spared his bird in November 1963, just three days before his assassination.
Q 19Police in which US city began calling the chaotic shopping day after Thanksgiving 'Black Friday'?
Philadelphia
Philadelphia police used it in the 1950s for the crowds and traffic jams; the city's merchants tried and failed to rebrand the day 'Big Friday' before stores recast it as the day their books move into the black.
Q 20'Cyber Monday' was invented in 2005 by a division of which organisation?
National Retail Federation
The National Retail Federation's online arm, Shop.org, coined it after noticing that online sales spiked when people got back to fast office internet connections after the holiday weekend.
Bristol, Rhode Island dates its celebration to the 'Patriotic Exercises' first led in 1785 by Henry Wight, a minister who had fought in the Revolutionary War.
Q 24In which New York neighbourhood does Nathan's hold its July 4th hot dog eating contest?
Coney Island
Coney Island is the contest's home, but the legend that four immigrants started it there in 1916 was a publicity invention, as one of its promoters admitted in 2010.
Q 25Which competitive eater transformed the Nathan's contest in 2001 by eating 50 hot dogs?
Takeru Kobayashi
Takeru Kobayashi, a rookie from Japan, almost doubled the old record of about 25 and won six straight titles before Joey Chestnut dethroned him in 2007.
Q 26Under which name was Memorial Day first observed nationally, on May 30, 1868?
Decoration Day
Decoration Day took its name from the custom of laying flowers on soldiers' graves, and 'Memorial Day' did not become the holiday's official federal name until 1967.
Q 27General John A. Logan, whose 1868 order set the first national Memorial Day, led which organisation?
Grand Army of the Republic
The Grand Army of the Republic, the brotherhood of Union veterans, began as a fraternal club and grew into a political force that pressed Congress for soldiers' pensions.
Q 28Which flower do many Americans wear on Memorial Day in remembrance of the war dead?
Poppy
Poppy: the custom grew from the First World War poem 'In Flanders Fields', which inspired YWCA worker Moina Michael to pin on a silk one and hand out more to others.
Q 29The National Moment of Remembrance Act asks Americans to pause on Memorial Day at what time?
3:00 pm
3:00 pm is when a law passed in 2000 asks Americans to stop for one minute; Congress said the pause was needed to reclaim Memorial Day as the solemn day it was meant to be.
Q 30New York held the first Labor Day parade in 1882, but which western state first made it a legal holiday?
Oregon
Oregon passed its law in February 1887, beating New York, which had been first to introduce a bill; Congress made the day a federal holiday in 1894.