Thanksgiving Trivia Questions (with Answers) for the Whole Table

These Thanksgiving trivia questions are made for the moment after dinner when everyone is too full to move but nobody wants the day to end. Here are 25 of them, with each answer right under its question, plus a tiebreaker and our favorite tips for hosting the after-dinner fun.

They’re split into three rounds: the real history of the holiday, turkeys and the food on your plate, and parades, football and White House traditions. Read them from your phone, keep score on a napkin and let the debates begin.

Round 1: Thanksgiving history

1. In what year did the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag share the harvest feast often called the “first Thanksgiving”?
Answer: 1621, at Plymouth Colony in what is now Massachusetts.

2. About how many Wampanoag men came to that feast with their leader, Massasoit?
Answer: About 90. Colonist Edward Winslow wrote that Massasoit arrived with “some ninety men,” according to Smithsonian Magazine.

3. How many days did the 1621 celebration last?
Answer: Three days.

4. What did the Wampanoag hunt and bring to the feast?
Answer: Five deer.

5. True or false: pumpkin pie was served at the 1621 feast.
Answer: False. The colonists didn’t have the butter and wheat flour needed for a pie crust. There were no potatoes either.

6. Which magazine editor, who also wrote “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” campaigned for decades to make Thanksgiving a national holiday?
Answer: Sarah Josepha Hale. She wrote editorials and letters to presidents until one finally said yes, according to the National Park Service.

7. Which president proclaimed a national day of Thanksgiving in 1863, in the middle of the Civil War?
Answer: Abraham Lincoln. He set it for the last Thursday of November.

8. In 1939, which president moved Thanksgiving a week earlier, so that some states celebrated on one Thursday and some on another?
Answer: Franklin D. Roosevelt. The confusion lasted two years.

9. Since 1942, Thanksgiving has been on which Thursday of November?
Answer: The fourth Thursday, not the last. Congress settled it in a law Roosevelt signed on December 26, 1941, according to the National Archives. That’s why Thanksgiving can never fall on November 29 or 30.

Round 2: Turkeys and the Thanksgiving table

10. What is a male turkey called? A female? A baby?
Answer: A male is a tom (or gobbler), a female is a hen and a baby is a poult. One point for each.

11. True or false: wild turkeys can fly.
Answer: True! Wild turkeys are powerful fliers over short distances, with speeds of up to 55 mph observed, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

12. Where do wild turkeys sleep at night?
Answer: Up in trees, where they’re safer from predators on the ground.

13. What are the red, fleshy growths on a turkey’s throat and neck called?
Answer: Wattles (also called caruncles). Male turkeys have big ones; hens mostly don’t.

14. Which Founding Father wrote that the turkey was “a much more respectable bird” than the bald eagle?
Answer: Benjamin Franklin, in a 1784 letter to his daughter, Sarah Bache. He never formally proposed the turkey as a national symbol, Monticello notes. He was just grumbling about the eagle.

15. Why do cranberries float?
Answer: Each berry has four little air pockets inside. That’s why farmers can flood a bog and scoop up the berries from the surface, and why fresh cranberries bounce, according to Popular Science.

16. Which state grows the most cranberries?
Answer: Wisconsin, with roughly 60% of the U.S. crop. Massachusetts, Oregon and New Jersey follow.

17. Green bean casserole was invented in 1955 in the test kitchen of which company?
Answer: Campbell’s. Dorcas Reilly created it, and it was first called “Green Bean Bake,” Smithsonian Magazine reports.

18. Which company’s phone hotline has answered turkey-cooking questions every November since 1981?
Answer: Butterball, with its Turkey Talk-Line. Six home economists answered about 11,000 calls in its first season, Butterball says.

Round 3: Parades, football and White House traditions

19. The first Macy’s parade marched in 1924. What was it originally called?
Answer: The Macy’s Christmas Parade. It even included animals borrowed from the Central Park Zoo, CBS News reports.

20. Giant balloons joined the parade in 1927. Which cartoon cat was one of the first?
Answer: Felix the Cat.

21. Which NFL team has hosted a Thanksgiving game almost every year since 1934?
Answer: The Detroit Lions. They played the Chicago Bears that first year and took a break from 1939 to 1944 during World War II, according to CBS Detroit.

22. Which team started its own Thanksgiving home-game tradition in 1966?
Answer: The Dallas Cowboys, who beat the Cleveland Browns that day.

23. Which president’s young son, Tad, is said to have begged for a turkey’s life, and won?
Answer: Abraham Lincoln’s. Bonus fact: that turkey was meant for Christmas dinner, not Thanksgiving.

24. Which president made the White House turkey pardon a yearly tradition, starting in 1989?
Answer: George H. W. Bush, according to the White House Historical Association.

25. “Over the river and through the wood, to Grandfather’s house we go.” Which holiday was that poem originally about?
Answer: Thanksgiving! Lydia Maria Child first published it in the 1840s as “The New-England Boy’s Song about Thanksgiving Day,” according to the University of Toronto’s poetry archive. Pumpkin pie makes an appearance, too.

Tiebreaker: In what year did Sarah Josepha Hale first start writing in favor of a national Thanksgiving holiday? Closest guess wins.
Answer: 1827, a full 36 years before Lincoln’s proclamation.

How to host Thanksgiving trivia (and the rest of the evening)

The best after-dinner plans are easy to start and easy to drift in and out of. Here’s what works at our house:

• Mix the generations. Put a grandparent, a teenager and a little one on every team. Grandpa knows the parade history, and the 8-year-old knows what a baby turkey is called.
• Play one round between dinner and dessert. It gives the cook a break and buys time for the pie to cool.
• Let the kids be quizmasters. Reading the questions is half the fun, and nobody can argue with the answer card.
• Add a gratitude round. Between rounds, each team shares one thing they’re thankful for this year. It’s worth a point, and it’s often the best part of the night.
• Set up a puzzle before dinner. Put a puzzle on a card table or a jumbo floor puzzle on the rug. People drift over between football quarters and second helpings, and the conversation keeps going.

Keep the fun going into Christmas with a trivia puzzle

At a lot of houses, the minute the pie plates are cleared, it’s officially Christmas season. The tree goes up, the lights come out and the shopping lists get started. So why not open a Christmas puzzle the same weekend?

The Christmas Trivia Puzzle is a 1,000-piece holiday jigsaw that comes with 72 Christmas trivia questions on an insert, plus a seek-and-find in the art. Open it Thanksgiving weekend, leave it out on a card table and quiz each other every time someone stops by to add a piece. It’s recommended for ages 13 and up, and it’s an easy way to check a gift off your list early.

Need something for the younger kids?

The Christmas Trivia floor puzzle has a Christmas trivia question and answer on the back of every one of its 72 jumbo pieces, and it builds into a 2 ft x 3 ft holiday scene right on the living room floor. It’s recommended for ages 6–10 and was a 2025 ASTRA Play Award Finalist. Set it up next to the grown-ups’ puzzle and the whole family can quiz each other at once. For even more questions, save our Christmas trivia questions for kids.

More puzzles for the Thanksgiving crowd

Got football fans at the table? The Sports Trivia Puzzle is a 1,000-piece caricature puzzle of athletes that comes with 72 trivia questions covering football, basketball, baseball, hockey, the Olympics and more. It’s perfect for halftime.

For the history buffs, the USA History Trivia Puzzle comes with 72 trivia questions and a bonus insert of 50 seek-and-find items hidden in the picture. And for the uncle who can’t resist a pun, the Dad Joke Puzzle comes with 72 dad jokes to read aloud, and every joke is drawn into the art.

Want laughs instead of debates? The Funny Political Quotes Puzzle collects 72 funny quotes from politicians and first ladies, so the only politics at the table are the ones that make everyone laugh. Our 1,000-piece puzzles are recommended for ages 13 and up, and all of our kids’ floor puzzles have a joke or trivia question on the back of every jumbo piece.

Each puzzle page has a Buy on Amazon button. Browse all our Christmas puzzles and family game night puzzles, or save our America 250 trivia questions for your next get-together.

Happy Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is really about the people around the table, and a few good questions are one of the easiest ways to keep them there a little longer. Save these 25 Thanksgiving trivia questions for November 26, pass the pie and let the debates begin. And when the tree goes up the next morning, the trivia can keep right on going.

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Happy Thanksgiving from all of us at Livuzzle. Here’s to the next great conversation around your table.