For many of us, the day after Thanksgiving is primarily known as Black Friday — the kick-start to the winter holiday shopping season. But for workers in one industry, it goes by a slightly different moniker: Brown Friday. The nickname comes from the high number of service calls plumbers receive the day after a holiday that strains people's waistbands and kitchen sinks. Many plumbers say that Friday following Thanksgiving is twice as busy as any other day of the year.

The country’s first national plumbing standards were named after Herbert Hoover.

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Septic systems regularly failed before the 1920s. As commerce secretary, Herbert Hoover created a building and housing division within the National Bureau of Standards, regulating plumbing work for the first time. In his honor, the policies were dubbed the Hoover Code.

While Brown Friday gets its unappealing name from the sewage byproducts workers are often hired to handle, many plumbers report that service calls for bathroom fixes aren’t as common on that day. Instead, kitchen sinks, garbage disposals, and drains are the top offenders (though plumbers acknowledge that having more guests does put additional pressure on a home’s wastewater system). Most post-Thanksgiving plumbing issues stem from two culprits: grease and potato peels. Hot grease washed down sink drains eventually cools and solidifies, leading to buildup that can plug pipes. And when a massive heap of starchy potato peels makes its way down a partially clogged pipe, the grease and peels can congeal to create a kitchen nightmare. Fortunately, experts say there’s an easy way to prevent a Thanksgiving catastrophe: Toss meats, bones, and stringy or dense foods like those potato peels into the trash can instead of down the sink. 

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In October 1705, the Connecticut settlement of Colchester was facing an early winter. While New England was known for its cold snaps, this one was unusually premature and severe, with temperatures so low that nearby waterways froze. The timing was unfortunate; the community had not yet received wintertime provisions, which were typically shipped to them by boat, and a day of Thanksgiving — planned for November 4 — was quickly approaching. (At the time, Thanksgiving was not yet a fixed holiday.) The most important item, molasses, was running low in pantries around town, and without it, residents faced a gloomy situation: Thanksgiving without bread, baked beans, or pumpkin pie. Rather than suffer a paltry holiday spread, town residents voted to postpone Thanksgiving by a week in the hope that a molasses delivery would arrive in time. (Apparently it did.) In the years to follow, the event would be dubbed the “Great Colchester Molasses Shortage,” and eventually parodied in poems.

Presidents used to choose the date for Thanksgiving celebrations.

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Presidents were once responsible for selecting the day for Thanksgiving celebrations. The holiday shifted around — once it was even held in April — until 1941, when Congress designated the fourth Thursday in November as the official date.

Molasses was a crucial sweetener in early America, primarily because it was a low-cost alternative to imported sugar. Used in baking, beer brewing, and as occasional livestock feed, molasses was a multipurpose foodstuff. But more importantly, it was the sticky backbone of early American distilling. The amber-colored syrup is the main ingredient in rum, and New Englanders used it to build a booming industry that produced millions of gallons of the spirit each year. In fact, molasses was so important that it was a contributing factor in the American Revolution; in 1733, Great Britain issued the Molasses Act, which levied taxes on molasses imported to the colonies from islands outside of British control. The proclamation heavily impacted the American rum industry, created a molasses black market, and stirred up early sentiment against the crown, which would eventually boil over four decades later.

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Baking a no-frills pumpkin pie with canned pumpkin and a premade crust takes about an hour today, though pie-making wasn’t always so simple. Before the ease of cracking open a can of pumpkin, cooks had to stew their own mixture, cooking pumpkins for hours just to create a custardy pie filling. Selecting the right pumpkin was paramount to a proper pie — not every pumpkin was a prize pick for the pastry. Field pumpkins, aka the ones often bought today for decoration and carving, are particularly poor foodstuffs. Their stringy, watery flesh has little flavor, and for centuries they were considered fare for livestock, not people. But by the 1930s, the canned-food company Libby’s had changed the pumpkin perspective, helping to popularize the once time-intensive holiday dish — all by creating its own strain of pumpkins that are full of flavor.

Pumpkin pie was once cooked inside a pumpkin.

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The custardy pumpkin pies we eat today are far different from the earliest versions in colonial America. Some of the first pumpkin pies were crustless and baked inside a hollowed-out pumpkin, while other recipes layered slices of fried pumpkin and apples inside a simple pastry shell.

Contrary to much skepticism, canned pumpkin produced by Libby’s is real pumpkin, just not the kind you typically see at a pumpkin patch. Dickinson pumpkins, the seeds of which were first acquired by Libby’s in 1929 and are still used today, are more closely related to butternut squash than most species of field pumpkins, though classifying what counts as a squash or pumpkin is a botanical gray area. Both pumpkins and squash are considered cucurbits — a category of nearly 1,000 plant species, including cucumbers, melons, and gourds — though the larger confusion comes in part from language. Until the 19th century, “pumpkin” and “squash” were interchangeable terms. (Today, all pumpkins are considered a type of squash, and the term “pumpkin” itself doesn’t have a precise botanical meaning.) In 1957, the USDA vaguely declared that any “golden-fleshed, firm-shelled, sweet varieties of either pumpkins or squashes” could be used as canned pumpkin. Dickinson pumpkins grown from Libby’s Select Seed, the company’s proprietary variety, meet that requirement. That said, the semantics may not really matter that much after all — the specially grown gourds have become synonymous with pumpkin pie, so popular that Libby’s claims to sell enough of its canned product to produce 90 million pumpkin pies each holiday season.

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