Thanksgiving | featured news

The number of Americans hitting the road this Thanksgiving is expected to increase slightly from a year ago.

Thanksgiving is an infamously challenging weekend to fly, and the closing Sunday has a longstanding reputation as the most heavily traveled day of the entire year in this country. USA Today just reported that this year will be exceptionally bad (good if you are an airline) with 23.7 million passengers over the 12-day busy period surrounding Thanksgiving, up 150,000 from last year. The lightest travel day, not surprisingly, is Thanksgiving itself, while the busiest are the following Sunday and Monday with 2.4 and 2.3 million flyers respectively.

It used to be just called Thanksgiving. Now the day is increasingly called Black Friday Eve or Black Thursday, as retailers double down on ever-earlier opening hours for the kickoff of the holiday shopping season.

More people headed to stores and websites over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, and average spending per person rose 9.1 percent as bargain-hunting shoppers scooped up discounts on everything from gadgets to hoodies, a National Retail Federation survey on Sunday showed.

In a notable victory for Disney, The Muppets continues to rule over other family films at the Thanksgiving box office, grossing $12.3 million on Friday for a three-day cume of $24.8 million. The pic, which cost a modest $45 million to produce, is now projected to post a Wednesday-Sunday debut of at least $40 million, putting it behind only The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn--Part 1, which grossed $16.9 million on Friday for a cume of roughly $195 million (the pic will jump the $200 million mark sometime on Saturday).

It’s the Big Bang Theory, Charlie Brown! All the Thanksgiving specials Thursday night couldn’t hold a candle to a repeat of the CBS comedy, which delivered 11.2 million viewers and a 3.6 adult demo rating. Compare that to ABC’s Charlie Brown Thanksgiving (5.8 million, 1.8) and A Very Gaga Thanksgiving (5.4 million, 1.6 — more on that one here) and NBC’s 85th Anniversary of the Thanksgiving Day Parade (3.7 million, 1.1) and Happiness is a Warm Blanket Charlie Brown (5 million, 1.6). The best-performing special was Fox’s Ice Age: Mammoth Christmas (7.1 million, 2.3), despite the network getting the holiday wrong. And at least we can take comfort in Charlie Brown topping Lady Gaga, right?

On Tuesday night's Thanksgiving-themed episode, the contestants dedicated each performance to the person for whom they felt most thankful. (Parental units were amply represented here.) After Wednesday night, seven of the nine acts have even more to be grateful about – having survived a double-downsizing. None should be more appreciative than Astro, though, who knelt prostrate before an incensed public, and charmed his way back into their good graces. Of course, there are two others who won't be so thankful; those for whom turkey time will be tempered with tears. We'll get to them in a minute.

Undeterred by costlier gas and airfare, millions of Americans set out Wednesday to see friends and family in what is expected to be the nation's busiest Thanksgiving weekend since the financial meltdown more than three years ago....

An airplane that crashed Wednesday evening into a rugged mountain east of Phoenix was carrying three children on a Thanksgiving trip, authorities said. The aircraft, a Rockwell AC 69, crashed about 6:30 p.m. in the Superstition Mountains near Apache Junction, said Pinal County Sheriff's spokesman Elias Johnson .

The great majority of today's domesticated turkeys may not be able to fly, but their ancestors sure got around. The quintessential New World bird, Meleagris gallopavo, was already an Old World favorite by the time colonists in North America first celebrated any Thanksgiving feasts. Today's turkey researchers are investigating the big bird's genetic heritage and biology as part of an effort to improve several aspects of its cultivation.