The ClaimLinx office will be closed at 3 p.m. on Wednesday, November 21 through Friday, November 23 to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday with friends and family. All inquiries will be returned as soon as possible upon our return.
We hope all our clients and members are able to enjoy the holiday with loved ones. Our staff will be prepping and cooking turkeys, chowing down on mashed potatoes, gravy, cranberries, stuffing and so much more. How will you be spending your Thanksgiving? Let us know on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram by tagging @ClaimLinx.
To kick off the holiday, read more about Thanksgiving through the years:
- The first official national Thanksgiving holiday was in 1863 when President Abraham Lincoln established an annual Thanksgiving celebration on the last Thursday in November.
- Abolitionist and author of the song “Mary Had a Little Lamb” Sarah Josepha Hale lobbied President Lincoln for a consistent annual Thanksgiving holiday through a letter-writing campaign for 17 years.
- Before 1863, presidents had to declare a holiday each year. President Thomas Jefferson was the only one who did not, because he believed in a strict separation of church and state. Since Thanksgiving involved prayer at the time, he thought it violated that principle.
- President Franklin Delano Roosevelt decreed in 1939 that Thanksgiving be moved one week earlier in order to extend the holiday shopping season. Many holiday purists did not like the change and only 23 of 48 states adopted the change until November 1941, where it has remained since.
- The first Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade was in 1924, but it did not include the signature balloons the event is famous for now. German-American illustrator Anthony Frederick Sarg designed them for the parade for the first time in 1927.
- In 1953, an employee at C.A. Swanson & Sons overestimated demand for turkey and had an extra 260 tons of frozen birds. As a solution, Swanson cooked them and arranged the meat with cornbread dressing, gravy, peas and sweet potatoes and sold them as individual dinners. Thus the TV-tray dinner was born.
- The NFL held the first Thanksgiving Classic games in 1920 and since then the Detroit Lions and the Dallas Cowboys have always hosted games. In 2006, a third game was added with different teams hosting each year.
- Butterball started a Turkey Talk Line in 1981 so families would have a resource for cooking their famous birds through the holiday season. Now they typically receive 100,000 calls per season. See what the Butterball team can help you with this year.
From all of our staff, we hope you have a fun and fulfilling Thanksgiving holiday. Our team will be ready to get back to helping clients and members through open enrollment after this welcome pause spent with friends and family.