What IS Memorial Day Anyway?

Originally written published in the Charter Oak-Ute NEWSpaper Thursday, May 22, 2003

"Memorial Day...celebrates and solemnly reaffirms from year to year a national act of enthusiasm and faith. It embodies in the most impressive form our belief that to act with enthusiasm and faith is the condition of acting greatly"
~Oliver Wendell Holmes
From an address delivered for Memorial Day, May 30, 1884

Monday is Memorial Day, also known as Decoration Day, Ashes Day, not to be confused with Labor Day, it’s book end on the other side of summer or Veteran’s Day, it’s half-brother which was really intended for the living. Since World War I, it’s also been called Poppy Day, because volunteers sell small, red artificial flowers as a fund-raiser for disabled veterans.

Legend has it that throughout history, after major wars red poppies seem to pop up on battlefields and on soldiers graves. Poppy seeds lay dormant in the soil until it is violently turned or dug up, causing them to sprout.

After WWI in Flanders Field, Belgium. In the bomb craters and on mounds of rubble, poppies bloomed everywhere. The heavily churned earth and high concentration of lime from the limestone buildings made the perfect catalyst for the poppies to grow.

Some thought that the red poppies looked spilled blood. British mothers wore poppies in remembrance of their lost sons. The poppy has since become a symbol of peace and of remembering the sacrifice of the fallen soldier.

Memorial Day may have began in 1868, when Civil War General John A. Logan, commander-in-chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, a Union veterans’ organization, said that May 30th should be special day to decorate the graves of Union soldiers.

He may have chose May 30th on the suggestion of a Franco-American veteran, who noted that May 30th was "The Day of Ashes" in France-the day that Napoleon's remains were returned to France in 1840 from his exile to the island of St. Helena 1200 miles off Africa. What Napoleon’s ashes have to do with Union veterans, I have no idea.

Northern states celebrate Memorial Day on the last Monday in May. This became a federal holiday in 1971. In the deep South, Memorial Day celebrations honor Confederate soldiers who died in "the war between the states." Mississippi and Alabama celebrate Confederate Memorial Day on the last Monday in April. In Florida and Georgia, the date is April 26. May 10 is Memorial Day in North and South Carolina, and the holiday is June 3 in Kentucky, Louisiana, and Tennessee. Texas observes Confederate Heroes Day on January 19 (Robert E. Lee's birthday).

The first large observance was held in 1868 at Arlington National Cemetery, across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. The cemetery already held the remains of 20,000 Union dead and several hundred Confederate dead. After speeches, children from the Soldiers' and Sailors' Orphan Home and members of the GAR made their way through the cemetery, strewing flowers on both Union and Confederate graves, reciting prayers and singing hymns.

Many Americans don’t know is that how Arlington came to be our national cemetery. Arlington was the home of Gen. Robert E. Lee. Perhaps to send his family a message, Union sympathizers piled the remains of Confederate dead at his doorstep. You can imagine the stench.

Unfortunately the significance of this holiday is sometimes forgotten, buried in ads, sales, barbecues and water sports. It’s easy to see Memorial Day as just another day off. It certainly has a sweetness as the gateway to summer and a time for friends and families to gather.

But especially with two wars just in the last two years, I think we need to remember it for what it was intended, a day of mourning, and prayer for and gratitude to the men and women who lost their lives in the line of duty and their families.

Buy a poppy to support Veterans’ charities, pray for the widowed and orphaned families of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, and thank God for your freedoms.

"Soldier, rest! Thy warfare o'er,
Sleep the sleep that knows not breaking,
Dream of battled fields no more.
Days of danger, nights of waking."
~Sir Walter Scott