We tend to treat Veterans Day like Memorial Day and Memorial Day like the Fourth of July Jr. Yes, there are many Memorial Day parades and observations, often culminating in ceremonies in graveyards and cemeteries. But the participants, often as not, will then head off to the barbecues and pool openings that are characteristic of Memorial Day’s other identity, which is the opening day of the American summer.
Memorial Day came about in response to the Civil War, and it sits where it does on the calendar for a perfectly good reason. It started out as Decoration Day, a day to honor the brave (Union) war dead by decorating their graves with flowers — flowers that are most abundant in late May. Today, we have annuals that will bloom all summer, but these have been mostly introduced into American gardens over the last century. Native perennial flowers bloom mostly in the spring.
The first Memorial Day observance took place in Waterloo, N.Y., on May 5, 1866, one year following the war’s end. A prominent citizen of Waterloo, Gen. John Murray, took the idea of a national annual Memorial Day to his friend, Gen. John Logan, who in as capacity as the commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, the nation’s largest northern veterans association, issued a proclamation calling for a national Decoration Day in May 1868. It was observed that year on May 30, specifically because no Civil War battle ever took place on that date.
Veterans Day, on the other hand, came after World War I, and its date, Nov. 11, is the date of the armistice that ended that bloody conflict. Armistice Day, also called Remembrance Day, is observed around the world as a kind of international memorial day. It was first observed in the United States specifically to honor the dead of the Great War (as World War I was originally called), but it was ultimately expanded to include all veterans, both living and dead ((hence its name.) But its position on the calendar, at a time when the trees are shorn of leaves and the sun casts long shadows, invites somber reflection in ways that lush late May does not.
Although Memorial Day has marked the unofficial start of summer for about as long as it has existed, Congress cemented that status with the Uniform Monday Holiday Act of 1968. It moved four holidays — Washington’s Birthday, Memorial Day, Columbus Day and Veterans Day — from fixed dates to designated Mondays that would fall close to those dates in most years. (Veterans Day has since been restored to Nov. 11, and Martin Luther King Jr. Day was designated for a Monday from its inception. Labor Day has always been on a Monday.)
Although opening and closing the American summer with three-day weekends (Memorial Day and Labor Day) was largely an accident, it has proven to be an extremely popular one. However, it can’t help but diminish the missions of the two bookends, especially that of Memorial Day. Why should a day that ought to be our most serious remembrance of those who died for our freedom have to share its identity with potato salad, pool parties and the Indianapolis 500?
In truth, holidays evolve organically. For example, Anna Jarvis, the founder of Mother’s Day, detested the commercialization of her creation, and she tried to have it revoked. But it was beyond her power. That ship had sailed. And we’re mostly just along for the boat ride, on that holiday and every other one.
But consider this: The size and shape of our observance is, in the end, irrelevant, because no observance can be equal to what we owe. Memorial Day is but a date on the calendar to remind us. Our obligation is to remember our debt to those who gave the last full measure of devotion, not only on the last Monday in May, but every day.