Nov. 25 (UPI) — President Joe Biden on Monday pardoned two doomed-to-be-dinner turkeys at the White House in the longstanding National Thanksgiving Turkey event.
“This event marks the official start of the holiday season here in Washington,” the outgoing Democratic president told the crowd in one of the few remaining high-profile events Biden will mark as commander-in-chief.
Roughly 2,500 people gathered on the south lawn of the White House facing toward the Washington Monument to see Biden offer a presidential pardon to “Peach” and “Blossom” at the 77th National Thanksgiving Turkey presentation.
“It’s also my last time to speak here as your president during this season and give thanks and gratitude,” the president said.
“So let me say to you, it’s been the honor of my life. I’m forever grateful,” added Biden.
The two Minnesota turkeys were hatched on July 18 at a Northfield farm raised by John Zimmerman, chairman of the National Turkey Federation, and his 9-year-old son Grant.
On Monday, Biden implored the crowd this Thanksgiving “to take time from our busy lives and focus on what matters most: our families.”
“My dad used to have an expression,” he said. “Family is the beginning, the middle and the end, our friends and our neighbors.”
According to Biden, the two poultry birds were named after Delaware’s state flower: the Peach Blossom. He joked how Peach lived by the motto “keep calm and gobble on” while the mantra of Blossom was “no foul play, just Minnesota nice.”
This week the birds traveled to Washington, where Peach, at 41 pounds, and Blossom, at 40 pounds, shared a suite at the Willard InterContinental hotel in the nation’s capital per tradition.
“We started 40 birds back in July, and we’ve been slowly preening and primping them,” Zimmerman explained to Fox 9 KMSP in Minnesota on how Blossom and Peach got selected for the honor and on the “tests” the two birds had to take to get it.
But recently accusing the turkey industry of “astounding cruelty,” the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals — otherwise known as PETA — urged Biden in a letter to “please end this wretched ritual that doesn’t befit public office.”
Meanwhile, on the south lawn Biden said to attendees Monday it’s “not hyperbole” to believe “the fact that we are blessed to live in America, the greatest country on Earth.”
“We are. No matter what, in America we never give up,” he said. “We keep going, we keep the faith.”
The first documented turkey pardon was in 1963 by President John F. Kennedy just days before his assassination in Texas, but it didn’t really catch on as a recurring event until a few decades later when in 1989 then-President George H.W. Bush vindicated a turkey.
However, the annual tradition has been subject to historical debate.
The annual rite, many say, dates back 77 years now to 1947 when then-President Harry S. Truman absolved a turkey for the first time in the now decades-old tradition with the National Turkey Federation, but the tradition’s still fuzzy history could possibly go as far back as the presidency of Abraham Lincoln, the White House says.
Prior years include Biden’s Liberty and Bell in 2023, then Chocolate and Chip in 2022 and Peanut Butter and Jelly in 2021 under then-president and now President-elect Donald Trump.
But Peach and Blossom, according to Zimmerman, will make their way home back to Waseca in Minnesota, where they will live as “agricultural ambassadors” at the agricultural interpretive center Farmamerica.
“And today,” Biden said Monday. “Peach and Blossom will join the free birds of the United States of America,” he added.
