WASHINGTON -- The annual presidential turkey pardon has become a staple of the holiday season here in Washington D.C.
For each of the last 25 years, presidents surrounded by an adoring audience and festive trimmings have ceremonially "pardoned" a turkey or two of the more than 46 million that Americans will consume during the Thanksgiving holiday.
It's a little bit charming, a little bit awkward and perhaps one of the most misremembered American traditions.
For years, the presidential turkey pardon's origins were traced back to former President Harry S. Truman in 1947. But that's not exactly the case. Back in 2003, the Truman Library tried to correct that discrepancy in a statement.
The staff, according to the library, "has found no documents, speeches, newspaper clippings, photographs, or other contemporary records in our holdings which refer to Truman pardoning a turkey that he received as a gift in 1947, or at any other time during his Presidency."
It was President George Bush who first officially used the word "pardon" in 1989, kicking off the official custom that we all love to loathe.
While the tradition dates back to Bush and the late 1980s, turkeys have been a mainstay of presidential history for much longer. In 1863, Abraham Lincoln spared a Christmas turkey from the Christmas dinner table at the request of his son, Tad.
Horace Vose, a Rhode Island poultry dealer, sent U.S. presidents Thanksgiving turkeys for decades, starting in the 1870s with Ulysses S. Grant and ending when Vose died in 1913.
Three days before his assassination in 1963, John F. Kennedy reportedly spared a turkey's life. "We'll just let this one grow," Kennedy said, according to the New York Times, before sending the turkey back to its farm.
The turkeys for this year's pardoning hail from Foster Farms in Modesto, California. At first, the birds -- which were chosen from a dozen finalists at the Northern California farm -- were uncreatively named Tom One and Tom Two.
But the White House has ceremoniously dubbed the two turkeys Honest and Abe. According to the White House, both birds like country music. Honest is a bit bigger, and his "strut style" is "scoots in boots" while Abe is a bit more "macho man."
If you want a hand in deciding which turkey should receive a pardon, the National Turkey Federation has opened a Twitter poll:
Vote for the National Thanksgiving Turkey that President Obama will announce tomorrow. #TurkeyPardon2015— NatlTurkeyFederation (@TurkeyGal) November 24, 2015
Just one of the two turkeys will receive a pardon, but both will be sent to live out their days on a Virginia farm. This is where things get a little bit uncomfortable.
Pardoned turkeys just don't live that long, a fact that we can chalk up to the way that industrially-grown turkeys are fattened up. Just one bird pardoned by President Barack Obama has lived to see the next year's Thanksgiving.
Hopefully this year's pardoned turkey will have better luck than the birds that came before him.
Some information from The Associated Press