From the sound of millions of belts being unnotched, today is either Gay Pride or Thanksgiving in the U.S. It’s the one day out of the year that guys into fisting can demonstrate their skills to family and friends without anyone batting an eye, that rice queens can proudly proclaim how much they love dark meat and no one notices, that butterball is not a derogatory word, and this year that Congress can sue President Obama for using executive power for granting amnesty to the White House’s turkey.

Thanksgiving is a uniquely American holiday and you have to be an American to understand it. Because only in America do we give thanks for all of the bountiful blessings we enjoy by eating enough to feed a small, third-world country. In fact, it’s estimated Americans will eat 46 million turkeys today. And ya don’t even want to know what we do to Jello in honor of our Thanksgiving traditions. In honor of those traditions, I thought I’d give you some interesting Thanksgiving facts to digest:

Thanks to our country’s practice of super-sizing everything, the average turkey has gone from 13lbs 80 years ago to 30lbs today. That sounds like a humongous amount of growth, but to put it in perspective, Chis Christie tripled his weight in half that amount of time.

Like sexpats in Pattaya, male turkeys today tip the scales far grander than do the other two genders, weighing in at an average of 50lbs. And like many of those sexpats, that extra weight makes them unable to actually mate. Most turkey breeding today is done by artificial insemination.

Speaking of which, thanks to the popularity of surrogates I can’t see a turkey baster these days without thinking about vagina. Just sayin’.

If the idea of current breeding practices makes you feel sorry for male turkeys, you can buy a ‘heritage’ turkey instead – they’re the product of good old-fashioned turkey sex. The drawback is that they cost about $200. And you can enliven your own sex life for that amount of money.

Not that it really matters anyway, because turkeys don’t have a penis.

But the good news is that pumpkin pie counts as a vegetable.

Thanks to retail stores wanting a longer holiday shopping season, back in 1939 President Franklin D. Roosevelt used an executive order to move Thanksgiving back by a week, pissing off the public who had to then change their holiday plans, or celebrate two Thanksgivings that year, and causing many to refer to the day as Franksgiving.

The turkey was actually named after the country of Turkey. At least in America. In Portugal they call it a Peru. And in Greece they call turkeys French birds.

Wild turkeys can run up to 25 mph – faster than Usain Bolt over a full 100 meters – and fly up to 55 mph.

According to the National Turkey Foundation, approximately 690 million pounds of turkey were consumed in the United States during Thanksgiving 2007, equal to the poundage of 4.48 million people of average weight, which also equaled the weight of the entire population of Singapore that year. Um. I think we’re up to the weight of the entire population of China by now.

That popular Christmas Carole, Jingle Bells, was originally a song written for children to celebrate Thanksgiving. Fortunately it quickly became associated with Xmas instead, saving us about a week of having to hear that dreadful ditty.

Thomas Jefferson thought a Federal holiday for Thanksgiving was “the most ridiculous idea” ever conceived, a statement Benjamin Franklin responded to by beginning the tradition of calling male turkeys Tom.

In 1947 when Chuck Yeager was responsible for being the first man to break the sound barrier, he was also responsible for the world learning turkeys can have heart attacks; the sonic boom caused by his flight caused the turkeys in fields by Edwards Air Force Base to drop dead from the shock of the passing jet.

Like the octopus, turkeys change color depending on its emotions; their heads can go from red to white to pink to blue to gray. Which minus a color or two may sound vaguely familiar to you.

When a man slaps another man’s face repeatedly with his penis, it’s called a turkey slap. It’s also called a Thanksgiving tradition at my house. Hope you enjoy yours as much as I will mine.

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