Some Thanksgiving traditions just make sense: sharing a meal with friends and family, eating too much pumpkin pie, fighting over the TV remote. But the president of the US taking time out of, y’know, running the country to stand in the Rose Garden and give a pardon to a turkey that doesn’t appear to have committed a crime? Yeah… that’s a bit of an odd one. So where exactly does this bizarre custom come from? The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

There’s a long-told tale that the first presidential turkey pardon was dished out by President Abraham Lincoln after his son, Tad, asked his father to spare it, having become fond of the bird. However, it’s likely that this story is apocryphal; the story was first told by White Ho

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