Thanksgiving is by far my favorite holiday.

While others gravitate toward the Christmas season and its good cheer or Independence Day and its patriotic swell, I find myself at home in the least commercialized and most basic of holidays on the fourth Thursday of November.

It's the concept of Thanksgiving that I find most appealing. Certainly, it gives us impetus to be at home over the holidays. I remember returning home from college through a raging South Dakota blizzard after being away from home for the first time and the warm feeling of being welcomed back by my family.

I also remember the Thanksgiving of 1989 when my best friend from college Doug Englert and I shared a turkey sandwich in a little deli in an earthquake stricken part of San Francisco and the sense of gratitude that swelled as we walked among the homeless that grown since that falls temblor.

Of course, Thanksgiving means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, and its history - like the history of many long held institutions - can be a bit murky. Such should be expected when one relies on Charlie Brown specials and grade school plays to support our institutional holidays as much as school books and documentaries.

Here are a few things that you may or may not know about Thanksgiving and its cornucopia of trivia and lesser known facts.

The mother of Thanksgiving

The pilgrims may have been the first to celebrate Thanksgiving with their three day festival in Plymouth, but it was a midlife magazine editor who is likely most responsible for the holiday.

Sarah Josepha Hale began her crusade to make Thanksgiving a holiday in the 1820s and didn't relent until her death. "Thanksgiving like the Fourth of July should be considered a national festival and observed by all our people," she wrote.

By the time President Abraham Lincoln issued his 1863 proclamation declaring Thanksgiving a national holiday, Hale had written thousands of letters advocating the move. And as a successful magazine editor, her influence in the matter had proved the difference.

Lions No. 1 on Thanksgiving radio and TV, No. 30 in the NFL

Not only do the Lions play on TV every Thanksgiving, they were also the first NFL radio broadcast on that day.

The first Thanksgiving Day was on Nov. 29, 1934, between the Lions and the Chicago Bears. Largely a promotional tactic of Lions owner George Richards, the ploy worked as the University of Detroit stadium saw its first sell out for a professional football game.

It became the first National Football League game to be broadcast over the radio as NBC sent out the signal to 94 stations nationwide.

Oh, yeah, and the Lions lost the game, of course. But they did come back to win the next year in a rematch against the Bears.

The first televised Thanksgiving Day was on Nov. 22, 1956, when the Lions faced off against longtime rival Green Bay Packers. Oh, yeah, and they lost that time, too.

Some things never change.

Let's all get together and go Thanksgiving caroling

Why does Christmas get all the good songs? And why doesn't Thanksgiving have any memorable ditties dedicated in reverence to it? (That is, if you consider the "Turkey trot trot trot, Across the parking lot lot lot" song not memorable.)

Well, the answer is that even when someone writes a great Thanksgiving song, the Christmas fans steal it.

At least that was the case of James Pierpont's best known masterpiece "Jingle Bells." Pierpont wrote "The One-Horse Open Sleigh" in 1857 for a Thanksgiving program at a Boston church where he taught Sunday school.

A performance by Sunday school children proved so successful that they were asked to repeat the performance for the more popular Christmas program, where those thieving Christmas lovers dressed it up with Santa's sleigh - (at church, even!) and essentially made it a Christmas carol for evermore.

Oh, the indignity!

What, no popcorn?

If you are looking from someone to point the finger at for spreading misinformation on there being popcorn at the first Thanksgiving, look no further than novelist Jame Austen. It is she who wrote in "Standish of Standish" in 1889 the following passage:

"The meal was a rude one looked upon with the dainty eyes and languid appetites of to-day, but to those sturdy and heroic men and women it was a veritable feast, and at its close Quadequina with an amiable smile nodded to one of his attendants, who produced and poured upon the table something like a bushel of popped corn, - a dainty hitherto unseen and unknown by most of the Pilgrims. All tasted, and John Howland hastily gathering up a portion upon a wooden plate carried it up to the Common house for the delectation of the women, that is to say, for Elizabeth Tilley, whose firm young teeth craunched it with much gusto.

The problem is that there is no historic backing for there being popped corn among the Plymouth colonists, either anecdotal or archaeologically.

Likely, popped corn didn't arrive in the region until the late 18th century.

Thanksgiving in April

Thanksgiving became a holiday until right before the Civil War, and it was once held as early as April 13.

For years, Thanksgiving was celebrated only sporadically throughout the colonies. So when George Washington, the father of our country, issued a proclamation recognizing Thanksgiving, you think that it would have been set in stone. But it wasn't.

The three presidents after Washington proclaimed a thanksgiving day here and there, but nothing permanent. Thomas Jefferson, another founding father, worried that the holiday might cross the boundaries of church and state. And James Madison proclaimed that Thanksgiving be held on April 13.

I mean, what was he thinking? Football season doesn't even start until September.

Thank goodness for Old Abe, who, in 1863 after getting a lift by the Union victory at Gettysburg, proclaimed that the holiday would be observed every year on the fourth Thursday of November.