Holiday Weekend

Ahhhh! A holiday weekend. There are many reasons to be thankful for this day. A time for reflection, a cup of coffee in the morning, a hike with friends. (The house cleaning, laundry, paying bills, quilt show website update, filling propane tanks, and garden debris chipping/shredding can just wait a wee bit…)

A little history of Memorial Day from a blog I found: “Now observed on the last Monday of May, Memorial Day was originally known as Decoration Day and dates back to the years following the Civil War. At the time, groups would decorate the graves of Confederate and Union soldiers, a practice still acknowledged with people often visiting cemeteries to decorate veteran graves.

While the tradition existed throughout the U.S., in 1966 the federal government declared Waterloo, New York – which had commemorated the day since May 5, 1866 – the official birthplace of Memorial Day. In 1868, May 30 was set aside as a nationwide Decoration Day, with the date selected because it didn’t correspond to the anniversary of any particular battle.

After World War I, the day became known to honor veterans of both the Civil War and the more recent conflict. It remained on May 30 until 1968, when Congress passed the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, which established Memorial Day as the late Monday in May to create a three-day holiday for federal employees. The change went into effect in 1971, the same day Memorial Day was designated a federal holiday.”