Happy Thanksgiving!

thanskgiving ~ Thanksgiving Day is a national holiday celebrated primarily in the United States and Canada as a day of giving thanks for the blessing of the harvest and of the preceding year.

Seeing as it's Thanksgiving, therefore a holiday, I thought a little trivia might be in order. :-D

The Canadian Thanksgiving has been celebrated on the second Monday in October since 1931.

Algonquin Indians were among the first to harvest wild cranberries. They used them as food, medicine, and a symbol of peace.

The tradition of breaking the wishbone dates back to the Etruscans of 322 B.C. The Romans brought the tradition with them when they conquered England and the English colonists carried the tradition on to America.

While pumpkin pies are a staple of many North American Thanksgiving meals, the pies weren't popular in Thanksgiving dinners until the early nineteenth century, according to The Oxford Encylopedia of Food and Drink in America.

The cornucopia, often associated with Thanksgiving, is a symbol of abundance and nourishment. The horn-shaped container typically contains produce, flowers, nuts, or wealth in some form

Canadians purchased three million whole turkeys for Thanksgiving in 2011, according to the Turkey Farmers of Canada - about 32% of all whole turkeys sold during the year.

Thanksgiving is a statutory holiday in Canada, except in P.E.I., Newfoundland and Labrador, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.

Thanksgiving was first celebrated in Canada when English explorer Martin Frobisher held a feast in what is now Newfoundland to mark his safe arrival to the New World in 1578.

Oh, look. A quiz! Thanksgiving Quiz

And here's another one 'cause today's a holiday and you have nothing better to do. ;-) Happy Thanksgiving Quiz

But it's not just a holiday for Canadians. Our Yankee friends to the south get the day off too. They get to celebrate:

So just to be fair, I had to look up a little trivia about Columbus Day too.

Columbus Day has been celebrated nationwide since 1937. On a state level, Columbus Day was first celebrated in Colorado in 1906.

The day, as the name suggests, honors Christopher Columbus and his arrival in the Americas.

Columbus landed in the Americas on Oct. 12, 1492 with a crew of 90 people.

While the federal holiday is called Columbus Day in the United States, it is called Día de la Raza ("Day of the Race") in many Latin American countries.

Christopher Columbus wasn't the first European to find the Americas, as he set foot on islands in the Bahamas. Technically, Columbus never entered North America and never knew he discovered a continent.

The region is believed to have been discovered 500 years before Christopher Columbus' birth by Norse explorer Leif Erikson.

In the United states, four states do no recognize Columbus Day. Those states are Hawaii, Alaska, Oregon and South Dakota. Instead, Hawaii celebrates Discoverers' Day, South Dakota celebrates the day as Native American Day and Oregon does not recognize or commemorate the day. Other states, like Nevada and Iowa, do not celebrate the day as an official holiday.

There is a movement to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous People's Day. The city of Berkeley, in California, has been celebrating the day as such since 1992.

And what do you know . . . there's a quiz for it too!

Columbus Day Trivia Quiz

Christopher Columbus Day Trivia Quiz

No matter what holiday you're celebrating today, have a good one!

Random Writerly Facts

One out of every eight letters you read is the letter ‘e’. In 1939 an author named Ernest Vincent wrote a 50,000 word novel called Gadsby. The only thing unusual about the novel is that there is not a single letter ‘e’ in the whole thing.

In the book, Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, is a sentence that is 823 words long. When Victor wrote to his editor inquiring about their opinion of the manuscript, he wrote, "?" They answered, "!"

If you stretched out all the shelves in the New York Public Library, they would extend eighty miles. The books most often requested at this library are about drugs, witchcraft, astrology and Shakespeare.

Emily Dickenson developed a case of agoraphobia and was reluctant to leave her own property, sometimes even her own room.

More than two and a half billion Bibles have been made. If you put them on a long bookshelf and started driving along the shelf at 55 mph, you would have to drive 40 hours per week for over four months to get to the end. All these Bibles would fill the New York public library 467 and one-half times. The Bible contains 3,566,480 letters, or 810,697 words.

The first published book ever written on a typewriter was The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Mark Twain used a Remington in 1875.

It took Noah Webster 36 years to write his first dictionary.

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Random Facts About Dr. Seuss

Theodor Seuss Geisel did not have any children of his own and admitted to being slightly afraid of them. In an interview, his widow Audrey claimed the unpredictability of children often unnerved him. "What might they do next? What might they ask next?" he would exclaim.

It is widely known that Dr Seuss was a pseudonym. What is lesser known, however, is the story behind Geisel's need for a pseudonym. Purportedly, while a student at Dartmouth, Geisel was caught drinking with several other boys in his dorm. Usually this wouldn't be a very big deal, college boys drinking, but this occurred during prohibition. Consequently, Dartmouth prohibited Geisel from engaging in anymore extracurricular activities, including his work for the college's humor magazine Jack O Lantern. In order to get around the administration's orders, he adopted the pen name "Dr Seuss" and used it for all magazine content from that point on.

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Charles Dickens was preoccupied with looking in the mirror and combing his hair - he did it hundreds of times a day. He rearranged furniture in his home - if it wasn't in the exact "correct" position, he couldn't concentrate. Obsessed with magnetic fields, Dickens made sure that every bed he slept in was aligned north-south. He had to touch certain objects three times for luck. He was obsessed with the need for tidiness, often cleaning other homes as well as his own.

Dickens suffered from epilepsy and made some of his characters - like Oliver Twist's brother - epileptics. Modern doctors are amazed at the medical accuracy of his descriptions of this malady.

His study had a secret door designed to look like a bookcase. The shelves were full of fake books with witty titles, such as Noah's Arkitecture and a nine-volume set titled Cat's Lives. One of his favorites was a multi-volume series called The Wisdom of Our Ancestors, dealing with subjects like ignorance, superstition, disease, and instruments of torture, and a companion book titled The Virtues of Our Ancestors, which was so narrow that the title had to be printed vertically.

Dickens was a devotee of mesmerism, a system of healing through hypnotism. He practiced it on his hypochondriac wife and his children, and claimed to have healed several friends and associates.

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When British poet and novelist Thomas Hardy died on January 11, 1928, his literary contemporaries decided he was too important to be buried in his hometown's simple churchyard. The good people of Dorset, where Hardy had spent nearly all of his 88 years, vehemently disagreed. The two groups reached a grisly compromise.

The author's body was cremated, and his ashes were interred in the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey. Hardy's heart, on the other hand, was placed inside a small casket and buried beside the grave of his first wife in a Dorset churchyard.

To this day, a rumor persists that the author's heart was accidentally devoured by his housekeeper's cat, and that the heart of a pig was buried in its place.

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O. Henry (born William Sydney Porter) may have been the master of the popular short story form, but he was far less skilled when it came to money. While working as a bank teller in Houston, the fledgling author was accused of embezzling a few thousand dollars, prompting his rather sudden move to Honduras.

A few years later, when he came back to visit his dying wife, he was arrested and sentenced to five years in prison. It was here that convict Porter assumed the pen name O. Henry. His incarceration offered him the time to write as well as a chance to mix with a slew of seedy characters, perfect fodder for his fiction.

A model inmate, Porter was released in 1901, after serving just three years. He passed away in 1910 with 600 stories, but reportedly only 33 cents, to his name.

Random Shakespeare

William was born to a Stratford tanner named John Shakespeare. His mother Mary was the daughter of a wealthy gentleman-farmer named Robert Arden.

Nobody knows Shakespeare’s true birthday. The closest we can come is the date of his baptism on April the 26th, 1564. By tradition and guesswork, William is assumed to have been born three days earlier on April the 23rd, a date now commonly used to celebrate his birthday.

Legend has it that at the tender age of eleven, William watched the pageantry associated with Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Kenilworth Castle near Stratford and later recreated this scene many times in his plays.

Although he was one of literature’s greatest figures, Shakespeare never attended university.

Most academics agree that William wrote his first play, Henry VI, Part One around 1589 to 1590 when he would have been roughly 25 years old.

It is believed Shakespeare started writing the first of his 154 sonnets in 1593 at age 29. His first sonnet was Venus and Adonis, published in the same year.

Of the 154 sonnets the playwright penned, his first 26 were said to be directed to an aristocratic young man who did not want to marry. William’s 126th sonnet contains a farewell, to "my lovely boy" a phrase taken to imply possible homosexuality by some postmodern Shakespeare academics. Sonnets 127 - 152 talk about a dark woman, the Bard seems to have had mixed feelings for.

Shakespeare lived through the Black Death, which took place when he was 39. This epidemic killed over 33,000 in London alone in 1603 and later returned in 1608.

William never published any of his plays. We read his plays today only because his fellow actors John Hemminges and Henry Condell, posthumously recorded his work as a dedication to their fellow actor in 1623, publishing 36 of William’s plays. This collection known as The First Folio is the source from which all published Shakespeare books are derived and is an important proof that he authored his plays.

Shakespeare and wife (Anne Hathaway) had eight children, including daughter Susanna, twins Hamnet, Judith, and Edmund. Susanna received most of the Bard's fortune when he died in 1616, age 52. Hamnet died at age 11, Judith at 77. Susanna died in 1649, at the age of 66.

The Bard's will gave most of his property to Susanna, his first child and not to his wife Anne Hathaway. Instead his loyal wife infamously received his "second-best bed". The Bard's second best bed wasn’t so bad, it was his marriage bed; his best bed was for guests.

William Shakespeare died in 1616 at the age of 52. He wrote on average 1.5 plays a year since he first started in 1589. His last play The Two Noble Kinsmen is reckoned to have been written in 1613 when he was 49 years old.

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Suicide occurs an unlucky thirteen times in Shakespeare’s plays. It occurs in Romeo and Juliet where both Romeo and Juliet commit suicide; in Julius Caesar where both Cassius and Brutus die by consensual stabbing, as well as Brutus’ wife Portia; in Othello where Othello stabs himself; in Hamlet where Ophelia is said to have "drowned" in suspicious circumstances; in Macbeth when Lady Macbeth dies; and finally in Antony and Cleopatra where suicide occurs an astounding five times (Mark Antony, Cleopatra, Charmian, Iras and Eros).

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Racism crops up frequently in Shakespeare’s work as well. In Othello, the lead character, a Moor of African descent, is continuously insulted for his heritage and appearance (especially in Act I) by his enemies and even his supporters (Lodovico) at the play’s conclusion when Othello murders his wife for mistakenly believing she cheated. Racism also occurs in Titus Andronicus (towards the Moor named Aaron), The Tempest where the misformed giant Caliban is called "this thing of darkness" (Act V, Line 275), and in Richard II.

The Bard's characters frequently debase those of colored skin. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, the character King Ferdinand, King of Navarre, racially remarks that "Black is the badge of hell, the hue of dungeons and the scowl of night" (Act IV, Scene III, Lines 254-255).

Anti-Semitism also crops up. The Jewish moneylender Shylock in the Merchant of Venice is portrayed as greedy and calculating. At the play’s conclusion he is forced to change religion to Christianity as punishment for wanting "a pound of flesh" from Antonio who agreed to this if his friend forfeited a debt to Shylock. Being a Jew is used as a curse in Henry the First, Part Two (Act II, Scene IV, Line 178), in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (Act II, Scene V, Line 53), The Merchant of Venice, Anthony and Cleopatra, Much Ado about Nothing , Macbeth and The Merry Wives of Windsor.

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Shakespeare introduced more words into English literature than all the other writers of his time combined, over 1,700 by some estimates, though in the past critics have credited him with introducing over 8000 words. If you’d like to see a list of these words, go HERE