Thanksgiving Day by the numbers: 10 mind-stuffing facts

Data from the Census and other sources provide some numerical insights into Thanksgiving, arguably the most cherished national holiday.

100 million pounds

Mayra Beltran/Houston Chronicle/AP
Cole Lacy carries a pumpkin he picked out of 3,000 pumpkins at St. Luke's United Methodist Church Pumpkin Patch on Oct. 10, 2012, in Houston. California, Ohio, and Pennsylvania each produce at least 100 million pounds of pumpkins per year, says the US Department of Agriculture.

The states of California, Ohio, and Pennsylvania each produce at least that many pounds of pumpkins per year, the US Department of Agriculture says.

But they're outmatched by Illinois, which leads the nation in output of the rugged orange gourds. To be precise, the Land of Lincoln is also the land of 520 million pounds of pumpkins. That should pave the way for plenty of pie.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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