Five Reasons Not to Attend a Memorial Day Event

My dad used to tell us that when he was a little boy, even in kindergarten and first grade, he and all his classmates would be walked by their teachers down to the city cemetery each Memorial Day so that they could decorate the graves of veterans. That is why he always called it Decoration Day, the old name for Memorial Day.

But what always got me about that story is that those little kids walked over a mile and a half to get to that cemetery! No school now would even think about doing such a thing, but this would have been in the late 1930s, and times were a little different. The parents of those students would have fought in or been directly affected by the First World War, and unfortunately, an even bigger war was just around the corner.

For the most part today, we aren’t as directly connected to someone who was killed in battle, so Memorial Day and its observances just don’t seem as important, and it would not be hard to come up with reasons why we shouldn’t participate this year–or any year. Have you used or can see yourself using any of these excuses?

1. Outside at the end of May, it could be really hot. Or rainy. Or cold.

2. It might run long, and the kids will be so bored.

3. I really don’t know any of the soldiers who have died.

4. I have a Memorial Day party planned, and I need that time to get ready for it.

5. I have already thanked a veteran and bought a poppy.

I know I have thought some of these, and you may have as well, but perhaps a better understanding of the day will help us rethink some of our excuses. Very soon after the ending of the Civil War, a powerful group of Union veterans issued an act establishing Memorial Day as the day the whole nation would remember the soldiers killed in battle and decorate their graves, and May 30 was chosen to ensure an ample supply of spring flowers. Women, especially in the South, had already been putting flowers and wreaths on graves, but this made it more universal.

The day, then and now, is not intended to thank or celebrate living veterans but those killed in battle. In fact, some veterans are offended when any focus is put on them that day. It is important to remember those no longer here, young people who never got a chance to do whatever it is you are planning or enjoying today. We think we’ll remember, but God knew we humans very easily forget. Several times God told the Israelites to set stones up as a memorial—as a visual reminder of what He had done for them. And going to look at the tombstones is a very good way to remember and be grateful for what those men and women did for us.

One of the points of the original Memorial Day orders was that cemeteries were to have “pleasant paths” to enable visitors and mourners access to prove to the present and coming generations that we have not “forgotten as a people the cost of a free and undivided republic.” So if you really can’t attend a service, maybe you can help clean up a gravesite or put down some flowers on the grave of someone who no longer has anyone to care, as a way of helping not just you, but others remember the cost.