Yankee Memorial Day and Decoration Day
By DAN LANGFORD
That’s not a derisive term, really; it’s just one I used to hear from my grandparents’ generation to differentiate their holidays. As I mentioned in a previous posting, Confederate Memorial Day is observed each year on the twenty-sixth of April. In the South of the first half of the 1900s, that was called “Memorial Day.”
The national holiday in May was originally called “Decoration Day.” The substitute “Memorial Day” began to be widely used after World War II, so a device was needed to differentiate. “Yankee Memorial Day” is the term many folks used to accomplish that differentiation.
I had thought it an old Brooks term till twenty-something years ago, when my wife and I, as newlyweds living in Athens, Georgia, invited a dear old widow to eat supper at our house on the last Monday in May. A member of the local gentry whose grandfather had been president of the State Normal School, she was refinement and gentility personified. Her thank-you note, written in a flowing Lucy Cobb Institute hand, mentioned that our get-together was such a nice way for Southern friends to celebrate Yankee Memorial Day.
Whatever you want to call it, have a happy one; but do pause to remember why we commemorate this day. Remember those brave men and women over time who have given up their tomorrows to ensure the freedom of our own.