Congress officially moved Thanksgiving back to the fourth Thursday of November in 1941, where it has remained ever since. Here’s a look at Thanksgiving NFL games and college football matchups to watch on TV this year on Nov. The Masked Singer averaged a higher rating in adults 18-49 (3.5) than any non-football sporting event this year. FOX benefited from the postponement of Ravens-Steelers, averaging 11.41 million for an episode of The Masked Singer immediately after Washington-Dallas. “Franksgiving,” as it was known, was decried by Thanksgiving traditionalists and political rivals (one even compared FDR to Hitler) and was only adopted by 23 of the 48 states. Last year’s Thanksgiving night game averaged 20.81 million. Which president tried to move the date of Thanksgiving and why?Ĭoncerned that the Christmas shopping season was cut short by a late Thanksgiving, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt decreed in 1939 that Thanksgiving would be celebrated a week earlier. That year they featured Felix the Cat and inflated animals like elephants, tigers and a giant hummingbird.

The brainchild of Anthony Frederick Sarg, a German-born puppeteer and theatrical designer who also created Macy’s fantastical Christmas window displays, the first balloons were filled with oxygen, not helium. The first oversized balloons debuted in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade in 1927. Bush in 1989.ġ3 Images When did the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade start featuring balloons? “It’s our Thanksgiving present to him.”) the annual White House tradition of “pardoning” a turkey officially started with George H.W. Kennedy was the first American president to spare a turkey’s life (“We’ll just let this one grow,” JFK quipped in 1963. Starting in the 1940s, farmers would gift the president with some plump birds for roast turkey over the holidays, which the first family would invariably eat. Who was the first president to pardon a turkey?

Read more about how the NFL popularized Thanksgiving football. By the 1890s, thousands of college and high school football rivalries were played every Thanksgiving. Soon after, Thanksgiving was picked for the date of the college football championships. The first Thanksgiving football game was a college match between Yale and Princeton in 1876, only 13 years after Lincoln made Thanksgiving a national holiday. The winning combo of football and Thanksgiving kicked off way before there was anything called the NFL. Why is football a Thanksgiving tradition?

Thanks giving football games 2018