Thanksgiving Day by the numbers: 10 mind-stuffing facts

There are a few important things about Thanksgiving week that the US Census Bureau can't claim to have tallied up.

Those would include Americans' collective thoughts of gratitude, the nation's highest-decibel football fans, or the number of turkey sandwiches consumed during the days following the holiday.

But data from the Census and other sources do provide some numerical insights into one of the most cherished US holidays. [EDITOR'S NOTE: The previous sentence has been revised for accuracy.] No knife and fork needed, just read on.

The Big 10

Jack Dempsey/AP
The NFL Salute to Service logo adorns a goal marker in Denver. College football conferences and the National Football League will provide a bumper crop of exciting football match-ups throughout this Thanksgiving weekend.

That's a college football conference, but here we're talking about the number of big football games over the long weekend. And the number 10 is artificially conservative.
 
In college football, the high-intensity match-ups include Arkansas versus Louisiana State, Ohio State vs. Michigan, Notre Dame vs. USC, Alabama vs. Auburn, Georgia vs. Georgia Tech, Clemson vs. South Carolina. Add a contest within the Big Ten itself (Penn State vs. Wisconsin) and that's seven big games right there.

The National Football League will contribute many more. Here are just the three to be played on Thanksgiving Day itself: Houston Texans vs. Detroit Lions, the Washington Redskins vs. Dallas Cowboys, and (in the evening) New York Jets vs. New England Patriots.

The list could go on of course. (Fill in the blank with your favorite local teams.)

1 of 10

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.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.