People on Facebook posting a recipe for “popcorn stuffing” reminded me of the following true story: When I was 16, I attended Thanksgiving at my religious aunt and uncle’s house. They’d also invited an ancient Irish nun. As a budding reprobate and dirtbag, I was uncomfortable in the presence of a fully-habited representation of Catholicism.

Before dinner, Sister Mary Katherine cornered me in the den and said, “Excuse me, son, do you know if they put popcorn in the stuffing?”

I said, “I’m not sure, sister, but why would they do that?”

She paused and then replied, “Because that way, when it’s finished, it’ll pop its ass off!” Then she clapped me on the back and guffawed loud and long. It was the funniest joke I’d ever heard. (After dinner, we snuck outside and smoked cigarettes and she told me she didn’t believed in God anymore but didn’t regret becoming a nun because of the good work she had done.)

Anyway, it was a joke when that nun said it, and it’s a joke now. Snopes did the research, and the corn wouldn’t pop even if you were dumb enough to add it to your stuffing. This dude actually tried it!

Speaking of things you should know are a joke, this ad for DuPont’s aerosol stuffing is making its rounds online. It definitely looks legit—props to its creator for getting the details of 1940s-50s advertising down perfectly—but it’s another joke…unless it isn’t. All the available evidence and common sense says it’s a joke (stuffing is solid and wouldn’t work in an aerosol) but DuPont has yet to confirm that it never marketed such a product, so there’s a very slight chance. I want to believe.

There’s a common belief that gets thrown around at this time of year: The reason you’re so sleepy after Thanksgiving dinner is because of the turkey. It’s true that turkey contains an amino acid called tryptophan, and tryptophan is needed to make serotonin, and serotonin makes you sleepy. But eating turkey alone doesn’t amplify serotonin production. Tryptophan is one of many amino acids that are flowing through your blood post-meal, and there isn’t enough tryp for it to affect serotonin—unless something prevents the other acids from getting to your brain.

That “something” is often the pie and other carbohydrates you snarffed down. According to Scientific American, a rush of carbohydrates encourages insulin secretion, and that prevents amino acids that aren’t tryptophan from getting to the brain. With no competition, tryptophan is free to make more serotonin, and that’s why you get tie-tie and need a widdle nap.

There’s an often repeated myth that when it rains, turkeys drown, because they look upwards to see where the drops are coming from and become fascinated by the falling water and stand there with their beaks open until they drown and die.

Here’s why this isn’t true:

• Turkey’s eyes are on the side of their heads, so they’d look sideways if they wanted to look at the rain and their beaks would be fine.

• Turkeys are too dumb to be “fascinated” by anything. People are fascinated by things. Turkeys just sort of stand around. You could say that turkeys are so stupid they don’t drown in the rain.

• The Butterball you’re carving up on Thanksgiving likely never saw rain or sky or anything else except the ceiling of an industrial agriculture pen during its short and miserable life. Happy Thanksgiving.

There are two popular stories about the origin “Black Friday.” They’re both fake. Black Friday was not named because some increase in sales meant that accountants would note the day in black for a positive balance. And Black Friday didn’t get its name because slaves were popularly sold after Thanksgiving either.

The truth is way more boring. The term dates to the early 1960s in Philadelphia. Police coined it due to the headache of dealing with surging crowds from the annual Army/Navy game, who went shopping en masse before watching college football.

Some people say you should rinse or wash a turkey before shoving it into your molecule-speeder-upper-box. These people are so wrong. When you wash raw poultry, you could contaminate your kitchen with gross bacteria from the bird, and it doesn’t make it any “cleaner” anyway. Just make sure you cook it thoroughly and wash your hands instead.

The dumbest person you went to high school with posted a panicked meme on their Facebook about how the US Government was making it illegal to play Christmas music before Thanksgiving. Rest assured: It is not true. It’s a case of satire being taken for truth by the gullible. The satire is the product of a 2017 Babylon Bee post headlined “Playing Christmas Music Before Thanksgiving Now A Federal Crime.” The law was supposedly passed in 2017 with unanimous support in both the House and Senate, which should have tipped anyone off that it was fake, even if the absurdity of the idea hadn’t.

The quirky annual tradition of the president “pardoning” a turkey is a piece of Americana that used to allow Americans to put aside our partisanship for a few minutes, until Donald Trump it and made it all weird and gross in 2018. But it hasn’t been around for very long.

Many people think Harry Truman pardoned the first turkey in 1947, but while he received a bird from the National Turkey Federation, he likely just ate it. Kennedy didn’t eat his bird and said so publicly, so the press joked that it was “pardoned.” The first president to explicitly refer to “pardoning” a turkey was Ronald Reagan, but the first full pardoning-of-a-turkey and making a big deal about it belongs to HW Bush, who said, “Let me assure you, and this fine tom turkey, that he will not end up on anyone’s dinner table, not this guy—he’s granted a presidential pardon as of right now.”