.

It's a "holiday" here for me. A day off work. I was thinking of this today when everyone was saying "have a good day off tomorrow". I liked it better back when I was a kid and it was a normal weekday (school/work day) because we had the ceremony of the minute of silence as a group. While I usually reflect on all the people who have served or are serving now in my own small way, I think tomorrow I shall go to the legislature to again be part of a group ceremony. I cannot imagine what it would be like to experience war.

It always throws me that 11/11 is Veterans Day and not Memorial Day here in the US. I don't know why. Just not what I'm used to.

I've had the (kinda-sorta) counter issue to gaspode. Memorial Day is a very big thing here in Canada - wearing poppies, moment of silence, TV specials, etc. It's not like in the U.S. where you have big sales, etc. for Veterans and Memorial Days and there's nothing about why they're being celebrated.

I ♥ Canada

We always had the day off from school growing up, and just as on Memorial Day, we normally went to a wreath laying for some portion of the day. This was important to my Dad, who is a veteran. Now that i don't live near them I miss doing that, though I'm not sure he does it as often.

I find it hard to get my head around the idea of such a day being one marked by sales etc. It just seems so disrespectful.

Remembrance Day is not such a big deal here, although the moment of silence at 11.00 am is pretty much universally observed. ANZAC Day is a day that is much more rigorously observed and is a public holiday where there is a ban on retailers opening before 11.00 am. It seems that every year there are more people at services (particularly the dawn services), which I at least partially attribute to the holiday now being decreed on the actual day, rather than the nearest Monday or Friday, as was the case for many years. It makes me proud to see my kids march in the parade with the Scouts and even more so that they have an understanding of what the day is about, which I certainly didn't have at their age. The most important thing though is that, by remembering, we make it less likely that we'll do the same thing again. By remembering what we lost not once but twice, I hope that we can avoid losing the best and brightest of yet another generation to war.

Miko, you can always attend a ceremony near where you live. I'm sure it would make your Dad happy, if nothing else.

I remembered them.

To me, it's always the day after my birthday. Today, that means I'm hungover and maybe still a bit drunk and uncomfortable with the way wars blend in so nicely with the rest of the culture having names and numbers and holidays. I mean, I understand that somehow it's necessary for large organized groups of people to kill other such groups, or at least maybe I do. I think it's the organized part that bothers me.

IN general, it bothers me that our culture honors so few observances - at least in the US. I think it's partly due to the very limited vacation time most employers offer, in that we feel that days off from work are a very scarce resource and so we should use them for recreation or errands. But even so, when I was younger there were more ceremonies, more parades, more notice taken in general than today.

Another factor might be the gradual attrition of the WWII generation, whose voluntary organizations and general get-togetherness were instrumental in staging some of these events.

Memorial Day becomes the time to welcome summer and have first barbecues and weekends away, the official opening of "beach season" along the shore, and the memorial aspect of honoring the war dead narly disappears. This isn't exclusive to the war-related days, either. Labor Day is like HUH? Last day to celebrate summer, back-to-school time. Any connection with the politics of labor, especially in America, is thin and weak. Martin Luther King Day and Presidents' Day become long weekends suitable for ski trips or short Caribbean or Florida vacations among a certain class of people. I even miss the way Sundays used to be very quiet days with most businesses closed and actual rest quite possible, the main event of the day being a family dinner. Thanksgiving seems to be the last hold-out that resembles a true holiday, but in the last decade or so it's been eroding away, with stores opening early for preview sales, convenience and grocery stores open in the AM, and so on.

It saddens me to lose these collective opportunities to reflect and think.

Nixon moved the holidays over to be contiguous with the weekends. I think that was the fatal step in detaching them from their original purpose.

We observed the two-minute silence at 11am today too - 2,000 of us in our building, our floor utterly silent.

Standing on the Tube on my way home this evening, I glanced up to see one of the Poems on the Underground, which brought a little tear to my eye.

≡ Click to see image ≡

Oh, and it's Remembrance Day here too, not Veterans or Memorial Day. Sunday is Remembrance Sunday, with a ceremony at the Cenotaph in Whitehall, and on Saturday there's a live broadcast on BBC1 of the Festival of Remembrance from the Royal Albert Hall.

I just got back from the ceremony held at the local legislative buildings. It was touching and I was glad to see the wide range of people in the audience. I met my brother for coffee after at a nearby coffee shop. There was a 90-year-old veteran behind us in line and my brother bought his coffee as well. It was a good morning.

Nixon moved the holidays over to be contiguous with the weekends. I think that was the fatal step in detaching them from their original purpose.

This was the case in Australia for many years and was only different in the past few. Moving them back to being on the actual day has made a dramatic difference to the interest in the meaning of the day.

It's good to hear that worked as I suspect it would, dg. I wish we had the courage to do the same, but I do think that the vacation-time issue makes people less inclined to support a return to the true calendar.