I knew the holiday was a solemn occasion, but I didn’t know it was intended to honor those who had died in service to our country. In my family, that wasn’t how we observed it.
Instead, it was a day to remember all of one’s deceased loved ones. The holiday was more a family occasion than a patriotic one, and it was especially important to my dad, because his parents were deceased.
So, every year, on the last Sunday morning in May, my family would pile into the old ’51 Chevy and set out from Greene County headed to Bloodland Cemetery, inside Fort Leonard Wood, eighty-five miles away, where Dad’s parents were buried.
Dad had grown up in Bloodland, but the small town had been demolished when the fort was built in 1940-1941. Bloodland and several other villages were erased from the map. About the only landmarks left were the cemeteries. People living within the fort’s boundaries had to move, but they could return to visit the graves of their loved ones.
Former Bloodland residents made a special effort to come back for Decoration Day, to pay their respects to their deceased loved ones but also to renew old acquaintances. Decoration Day was a time of reunion and solemn remembrance, infused with a picnic atmosphere.
When my family reached Bloodland, it was usually mid-morning, and a makeshift table with outdoor fare like baked beans and coleslaw would already be set up at the edge of the cemetery grounds. Mom always brought along a dish or two, which she added to the buffet. By the time we decorated my grandparents’ graves and Dad paid his respects to other folks, living and dead, it was usually time to eat. There was always a prayer first and sometimes a hymn. Despite the informal air, a spiritual quality imbued the proceedings.
About mid-afternoon, Dad would say his goodbyes, and we would load up for the trip home. I was always ready to leave, because I hardly appreciated the Decoration Day tradition at the time.
In the summer of 1969, though, when I took basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, I found myself looking back wistfully on those boyhood trips to Bloodland Cemetery. It had been almost thirty years since anyone had lived at Bloodland, and many of the former residents were now dead themselves. The tradition of gathering there for Decoration Day was already dying out. But during that hot summer of 1969, when we trainees would march south from the barracks at Fort Leonard Wood to the firing ranges where Bloodland had once been, I would glance over at the cemetery as we passed, and I would remember.
Dad died in 1970, and he was buried at Greenlawn Cemetery in Springfield. Afterwards, our family tradition of visiting the cemetery on Decoration Day moved to Greenlawn. Even though Dad was a World War II veteran, our trip to the cemetery was still more a personal remembrance of a loved one than a patriotic observance. But the gatherings at Greenlawn had none of the atmosphere of picnic or homecoming I’d witnessed as a boy.
Eventually, I began to think of the holiday in late May as Memorial Day rather than Decoration Day, and I learned it was formalized shortly after the Civil War as a day for remembering those who’d lost their lives in service to the country. The change in how I referred to the late-May holiday roughly coincided with the adoption of the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, which established that Memorial Day and certain other holidays would always be observed on a Monday.
The new law not only helped “Memorial Day” displace “Decoration Day” as the generally accepted term for the late-May holiday, but the three-day weekend provision of the act also gradually caused many people to view the holiday as the unofficial kickoff of summer—a time for going to the lake and having fun. Many Americans today scarcely consider the holiday as a time to honor the deceased.
I’m not one of the lake-goers, but I’m also not among those who reserve the day for honoring our dead war heroes. Although I long ago adopted the term “Memorial Day” and have come to understand the holiday’s patriotic purpose, I still think of it as a time to remember all my deceased loved ones.
Since I took basic training, I’ve rarely been back to Bloodland Cemetery. It’s now been almost 85 years since anyone lived in Bloodland, and the tradition of returning to the cemetery for Decoration Day is a faded memory. Yet I still occasionally think about those long-ago family trips to Bloodland, and I get even more nostalgic than I did 55 years ago marching through Missouri’s hot July sun past my grandparents’ graves.
Only recently did I learn that celebrating “Decoration Day” as a time of reunion and remembering one’s loved ones, as we did at Bloodland, is a tradition that can be traced to Appalachia. Predating even the Civil War, Decoration Day is still practiced in many Appalachian communities today.
Appalachian Decoration Day got carried to the Ozarks by early settlers, and it flourished here for many years. However, the ritual has melded over time with the more northern tradition of Memorial Day and has been weakened by the secular spirit of the Uniform Monday Holiday Act so that it scarcely exists as a separate, distinguishable tradition.
But it still lives in the hearts and minds of many of us Ozarks folk who have always thought of Memorial Day not as a day for honoring our military dead but instead as a day for getting together to celebrate our families and remember our loved ones who have gone before us. That doesn’t make us unpatriotic or unappreciative of those who have died in service to America. It just means we’re following a different tradition.
P. S. Last time, I mentioned that I'd started building an author website for the first time and that it was a work-in-progress. I didn't realize just how much of a work-in-progress it was. For instance, I didn't know that you had to format the darn thing especially for mobile devices separately from how you format it for desktops. Anyway, it's still a work-in-progress, but I have made a little progress since last week. Here's a link for anybody who wants to check it out: https://www.larrywoodauthor.com/.
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