Discover the surprisingly recent history of the presidential turkey pardon tradition and its quirky connection to Halloween in this fascinating deep dive.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ You know what is weird? Every November, right around the time we are all thinking about costumes and candy hangovers, the President of the United States stands in front of cameras and grants clemency to a turkey. A literal turkey. Not a person who made a mistake, not someone seeking justice, but a bird destined for the dinner table who gets a last-minute reprieve like something out of a peculiar American folktale.

I remember the first time I actually paid attention to the presidential turkey pardon tradition. I was probably eleven or twelve, still riding the high from Halloween and already eyeing Thanksgiving break from school, when I saw it on the news. My dad laughed and said it was the silliest thing presidents had to do, and honestly, he was not wrong. But the more I learned about this bizarre custom over the years, the more fascinating it became. Because like many American traditions, the real story is way stranger and more complicated than you would think.

The popular narrative goes that President Harry Truman started the whole turkey pardon thing back in 1947. People love to cite this date, you will see it everywhere online. The problem is that it probably is not true. The Truman Library has actually gone on record saying they cannot find any evidence that Truman pardoned a turkey. Sure, he received turkeys as gifts, because apparently that is what people gave presidents back then instead of, I do not know, books or something useful. But an official pardon? That seems to be more myth than history.

What we do know is that the National Turkey Federation has been presenting turkeys to presidents since 1947, right after World War Two ended and the country was trying to get back to normal life. These were not pardoned birds initially. They were just gifts, and most of them ended up exactly where you would expect at a fancy dinner. The whole presentation was really just a clever bit of marketing by the poultry industry, a way to promote turkey consumption during the holidays. Pretty smart when you think about it, even if it does seem a bit morbid in retrospect.

The timing of all this has always struck me as peculiar. We finish Halloween, that delightfully spooky celebration where we dress as ghosts and ghouls and embrace the macabre, and then we immediately pivot to this odd ceremony about saving a turkey from its fate. In a way, both holidays deal with mortality, just from completely different angles. Halloween lets us play with death, make it fun and silly with skeleton decorations and vampire costumes. The turkey pardon, meanwhile, is this strange ritual where we acknowledge that we are about to feast on millions of birds, but we will spare just one in a symbolic gesture that probably makes us feel better about the whole thing.

Presidents throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century received these turkey gifts, but they generally just accepted them graciously and moved on. Some turkeys went to farms, some went to petting zoos, and yes, some definitely became dinner. It was not until the 1980s that things started getting interesting. President Reagan made a couple of jokes about pardoning his turkey in 1987, though he was actually deflecting questions about the Iran-Contra affair at the time. Leave it to a former actor to use a turkey as a prop during a political scandal.

But the person who really cemented this as an official annual tradition was George H.W. Bush in 1989. He stood in the Rose Garden and formally announced he was granting the turkey a presidential pardon. After that, every president has kept the tradition going, each adding their own flavor to the ceremony. Some presidents are clearly amused by the whole thing, others treat it with mock solemnity, and a few have looked like they would rather be literally anywhere else.

What gets me is how this completely made-up tradition has become so entrenched in American culture that people assume it has been happening since the founding fathers or something. We love our origin stories, even when they are not quite accurate. The turkey pardon has only been an official annual thing for about thirty-five years, which in the grand scheme of American history is practically yesterday. Yet it feels ancient, like it has always been part of the November landscape along with falling leaves and that weird week between Halloween and Thanksgiving where nobody quite knows what holiday to focus on.

Reference​​​​​​​​​

The Harry S. Truman Library and Museum. (n.d.). Did President Truman pardon a turkey? Harry S. Truman Library & Museum. Retrieved November 7, 2025, from https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/

The White House. (n.d.). Presidential turkey pardon ceremony records. White House Historical Association Archives. https://www.whitehouse.gov/

George H.W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum. (n.d.). Turkey pardon ceremony, November 1989 [Photograph]. National Archives and Records Administration. https://bush41library.tamu.edu/