The Best Time to Eat Thanksgiving Dinner, According to Twitter

On Thursday, November 22, millions of people across America will celebrate Thanksgiving, but when exactly they sit down to eat the big meal varies from household to household. According to Twitter data reported by Food & Wine, families tend to eat Thanksgiving dinner earlier than later, with most people wrapping up the feast before 6 p.m.

On Thanksgiving day, tweets containing the word turkey peak around 11 a.m. This is presumably the time that most home cooks are loading their birds into the oven, because mentions of dinnertime and time to eat spike roughly three hours later at 2 p.m. (The word pie also peaks around this time, suggesting that diners are already fantasizing about dessert when dinner hits the table.) Twitter users get their social media expressions of gratitude out of the way early, with tweets with word thankful spiking at noon.

Post-meal tweets start to roll in in the late afternoon. Around 4 p.m., when people are feeling the effects of fatty foods and wine, tweets mentioning the word nap are at an all-day high. At 8 p.m., people start to regret the choices they made hours earlier with the phrases stomach ache and over eating spiking.

The tweets that make up this data haven't been adjusted for each user's local time zone, with Twitter deferring to Eastern Time, so it's possible that the timeline skews even earlier. If that's the case at your house, you may want to whip up a late second dinner with your Thanksgiving leftovers before Black Friday.

[h/t Food & Wine]