How Thanksgiving dinner has changed over the years

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• Thanksgiving meals have changed significantly over the years, though their fowl-and-starch heavy composition has remained the same.
• The modern Thanksgiving didn't get its start until nearly 200 years after the first Thanksgiving celebrations.
• Here's how Thanksgiving has evolved over the years, from the dishes themselves to how the holiday has celebrated.
• Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.

People have been celebrating Thanksgiving in America in some form or another since the 1600s.

But the holiday has changed constantly over the centuries, along with the dishes people prepare for their Thanksgiving feasts.

Certain foods, like cranberries, have been associated with Thanksgiving for centuries, and may have even been present on the first Thanksgiving table. Others, like chicken pie, haven't exactly stood the test of time. 

Read on for 16 examples of how Thanksgiving dinner — and the way we celebrate it — has changed over the centuries.

The earliest Thanksgivings were bigger lasted longer than today's events. Accounts from the early 1600s describe celebrations that lasted multiple days and featured dozens of people.

"They four in one day killed as much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the company almost a week.…Many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted," English settler Edward Winslow wrote in one of the few textual records of their first Thanksgiving in 1621. 

Source: Plymouth Plantation

The first Thanksgiving definitely featured a cooked bird — likely several — but it's unclear whether wild turkey was one of them. Either way, ducks or geese likely also made an appearance on the Thanksgiving table.

Historical records show that the Pilgrims in Plymouth went "fowling" for the meal, and we know that wild turkey were plentiful. But so were many other birds like geese and ducks. Another account from the fall of 1621 indicates that wild turkey were among the Pilgrims' stores. 

We do know that the Wampanoag tribe brought five deer to the occasion, so if you were thinking of adding some venison to the Thanksgiving plate, there's historical precedent. 

Source: The History Channel, Smithsonian Magazine

Love them or hate them, cranberries may have been the original Thanksgiving side dish by virtue of the fact they grew natively on American soil.

There probably wasn't cranberry sauce, however. While mixing sugar with cranberries wasn't unheard of, sugar usually was too expensive to import and was not yet grown in North America at the time of the Pilgrims. 

Source: The History Channel

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