Monday -- A Day of Remembrance

    The Crystal Lake American Legion Post 171 will conduct its annual Memorial Day Parade and Cemetery Service on Monday, May 31, 2010. The parade will begin at 11:00 a.m and the parade route will travel from Crystal Lake Central High School east on Franklin Avenue, north on Williams Street, and west on Woodstock Street to Union Cemetery. Following the parade, a memorial service will be held at Union Cemetery, located on Woodstock Street.
    In the event of inclement weather, the Memorial Day parade will be cancelled and the memorial service will be held in the Field House at Crystal Lake Central High School.
    Current forecasts call for sunshine today and Sunday with a chance of thunderstorms for Sunday night and Memorial Day with mostly sunshine on Tuesday.
Origination of Memorial Day
    The commemorative day was previously known as "Decoration Day"-- a day when the graves of the war dead were decorated. According to research, the commemorative day was originally held on May 5, 1866. The previous year a druggist in the village of Waterloo, NY, mentioned at a social gathering that a day should be set aside to honor those who died in the Civil War by decorating their graves.
    The day was officially proclaimed on May 5, 1868 by General John Logan, Commander of the Grand Army of the Republic. It was first commemorated on May 30, 1858, when flowers were placed on the graves of the Union and Confederate soldiers in Arlington National Cemetery.
     We are told that New York was the first state to officially recognize the holiday in 1873. All the northern states recognized the date by 1890. The Southern States refused to participate, honoring their dead on separate days until after World War I. Then the day honored all those who died fighting in any war, not only the Civil War.
    In 1971 Congress passed an act to ensure a three-day weekend for Federal holidays, so instead of (Decoration Day) Memorial Day is being held on May 30, it is celebrated the last Monday in May. Seven southern states have an additional date to honor the Confederate War dead. These include Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas.
Other Remembrance Practices
    Since the late 1950s, 1,200 soldiers of the 3rd US Infantry place small American flags on more than 260,000 gravestones at Arlington National Cemetery and then patrol the area 24 hours a day during the weekend to ensure that the flags remain standing.
    In 1951, the Boy Scouts and Cub Scouts of St. Louis began placing flags on the 150,000 graves at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery as an annual Good Turn, a practice that continues to this day. More recently, beginning in 1998, on the Saturday before the observed day for Memorial Day, the Boys Scouts and Girl Scouts place a candle at each of approximately 15,300 grave sites of soldiers buried at Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park on Marye's Heights (the Luminarian Program). In 2004, Washington D.C. held its first Memorial Day parade in over 60 years.
    To help re-educate and remind Americans of the true meaning of Memorial Day, the "National Moment of Remembrance" resolution was passed on Dec 2000 which asks that at 3 p.m. local time, for all Americans "To voluntarily and informally observe in their own way a Moment of remembrance and respect, pausing from whatever they are doing for a moment of silence or listening to 'Taps'. Some say it might help to return to the original date for Memorial Day and not worry about a three day weekend every year.