The name might be quirky, but in November, it's a perfect fit.
Welcome to Turkey, Texas, one of three towns in United States named after the Thanksgiving table's star.
"It's a pretty festive name," said 38-year-old Bud Ham on Tuesday afternoon.
Ham works as a mechanic in Turkey.
But there won't be any blown-out parades down the streets of Turkey on Thanksgiving. Instead, the Texas farming community of less than 500 people will quietly celebrate with one another in their homes. Here, everybody knows their neighbors, Ham said.
"I guarantee if you ain't got a Thanksgiving dinner, you can dang sure find one," he said.
Ham will spend Thursday eating deep-fried turkey at his parents' house as millions of kitchens across the country are flooded with familiar scents of food such as pecan pie and green bean casserole.
"Any time you have some kind of celebration and an overabundance of choices and selections, individuals tend to overindulge," said MSU associate nutrition professor Lorraine Weatherspoon.
And Thanksgiving is no exception, Weatherspoon said. Americans will overeat from Turkey, Texas, to East Lansing.
As the break begins, here's a glance at Thanksgiving indulgences and trivia courtesy of the U.S. Census Bureau.
• American farmers are expected to produce 664 million pounds of cranberries this year.
• Eight towns in the United States are named after "cranberry."
• The weight of all the sweet potatoes grown in the United States in 2005 was 1.6 billion pounds.
• This year, 265 million turkeys will be raised.
• The cost per pound of a frozen whole turkey in December 2005 was $1.07.
• Twenty-eight U.S. towns are named Plymouth, site of the first Thanksgiving.
