Friday was Memorial Day, the actual Memorial Day and not the one we set aside on the last Monday of May to celebrate with a long weekend. Most people today associate Memorial Day with our veterans and soldiers, but many do not realize the true origins of the holiday weekend we enjoy as the start of summer. Let's explore this holiday and its traditions.

Memorial Day was originally known as Decoration Day and was designated as a day of remembrance for our deceased soldiers. The practice of decorating soldiers' graves is an ancient one that preceded our holiday for centuries. The practice became nationally common during and after the Civil War when the women would decorate the graves of their husbands and sons killed in battle. Several different locations lay claim to being the origin of our Memorial Day including Warrenton, Virginia; Savannah, Georgia; Charleston, South Carolina; and Boalsburg, Pennsylvania.The holiday only became a federal holiday in the 20th century. In 1966, President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed a proclamation naming Waterloo, New York, as the birthplace of Memorial Day where a druggist named Henry Welles promoted the idea of such an observance to friends in 1865 and arranged the first formal decorating of the graves in 1866. Boalsburg lays claim as well, holding the first observance on July 4, 1864, when their ladies decorated the soldiers' graves there.The Southern states appear to have informally observed a decoration day throughout the Civil War with records of women decorating soldiers' graves in Savannah as early as 1862. According to Wikipedia, the Ladies' Memorial Association in the south played a key role in the development of a national day of memory which they first celebrated in 1866. Some sources credit this movement for inspiring Logan's General Order in 1868.When I listened to Memorial Day services growing up, I can remember hearing Logan's General Order along with "In Flanders Field" and the Gettysburg Address recited, but I never gave them a great deal of thought. As I got older. I gained more of an appreciation for these recitations and learned about their backgrounds. Logan's General Order was issued by General John A. Logan, commander in chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, which was a veterans' organization of Union Army Civil War soldiers who survived the war. Inspired by the decoration days in the South throughout late spring, Logan issued his proclamation to the GAR that the date of May 30 should be set aside as a day to remember and decorate the graves of the fallen soldiers.The Civil War was the greatest conflict in the United States since the Revolution and War of 1812 so for the next fifty years from 1868, people remembered our fallen soldiers on May 30th. The date was selected because it was a day on which there were no anniversaries of any battles. Following World War I, the holiday gradually came to be one in which all of our fallen soldiers were to be memorialized and not just the Civil War dead.Memorial Day's origin with the Civil War is also the reason The Gettysburg Address is recited during services. Following the vicious Battle of Gettysburg in 1863, the National Cemetery in Gettysburg was founded, and in November of that year the cemetery was dedicated. President Abraham Lincoln was asked to address the audience as one of the speakers. The keynote speaker though was not the president, but Rep. Edward Everett, who delivered a two-hour oration. Lincoln's speech was 271 words and two minutes long, yet it is well-remembered as one of the finest speeches in history. Its words are so important and vital in reminding us who we are as a nation and that we should always be vigilant of the fragility of our freedom.The third recitation in most Memorial Day services is the poem "In Flanders Fields" by Canadian Lt. Gen. John McCrae that was written in memory of his fallen comrade in 1915 following the Battle of Ypres in France. McCrae initially discarded the poem because he was unhappy with it, but his comrades saved it and eventually it become popularized and used as propaganda to raise money and sell bonds for the war effort. The poppies referred to in the poem are the ones seen growing over the graves of the soldiers buried in France. The intense fighting on the fields between East and West Flanders damaged the soil to such an extent that poppies were one of the few flowers able to grow on the ground. Today the fields of that fierce battle are covered with thousands of red poppies. This association of poppies and Flanders Fields is how the little red flowers came to be associated with Memorial Day as well.We as Americans take so much for granted such as our liberties and our freedoms. We forget that we must always remain vigilant and that we owe it to these fallen soldiers to constantly defend our liberties and freedoms not only against our enemies, but against our government when it gets too far out of line. We need to participate more in our country and not pass the buck to the next person. That is truly the lesson of Memorial Day.Till next time …