Memorial Day: Americans commemorate fallen soldiers, honor history and break travel records

May 12, 2025 by Leave a Comment

Flags and gathering for Memorial Day

Flagged crosses for Memorial Day civic ceremony in Waverly, Minnesota. Photo by Ben Franske, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

MONDAY, MAY 26: Hometown parades, ceremonies for fallen soldiers and the smell of barbecues firing up across the country: It’s Memorial Day!

The unofficial start of summer in America began, less than two centuries ago, as a solemn observance for the war that had consumed more lives than any other U.S. conflict. While memorial services still abound, the national holiday also means picnics, beaches, fireworks and, of course, travel, as Americans enjoy a three-day weekend.

2025 travel update: AAA’s travel forecast for 2025 says that 45.1 million Americans will travel at least 50 miles from home over the Memorial Day holiday period (Thursday, May 22 to Monday, May 26), setting a new record.

Scroll down in this story to read our best holiday tips. However, before we list those links, let’s celebrate a tireless historian who helped Americans recover our history of this more-than-150-year-old observance.

A PULITZER FOR THE HOLIDAY’S HISTORIAN

Memorial Day began as an annual, grassroots practice of sprucing up the gravesites of the countless Americans who died during the Civil War. That’s why, for many years, the observance was called Decoration Day, describing the flowers and colorful flags that seemed to sprout across cemeteries each spring.

For much of the 20th Century, however, the painful early roots of this observance were forgotten as proud civic boosters across the country tried to claim their own unique slices of this history. Then, Yale historian David W. Blight researched and corrected the record, finally honoring the fact that the courageous pioneers in observing this holiday were former slaves in the South who dared to decorate Yankee graves. In his book Race and Reconciliation, Blight writes, “Decoration Day, and the many ways in which it is observed, shaped Civl War memory as much as any other cultural ritual.”

MEMORIAL DAY and CIVIL RELIGION

The famed sociologist of American religion, Robert Bellah, also shaped the evolution of Memorial Day’s meaning in a landmark article he published in a 1967 issue of Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He called his long article “Civil Religion in America,” taking the centuries-old concept of “civil religion” and kicked off decades of fresh research into how our civil religion defines our American culture. You can read Bellah’s entire original article online.

A few lines from Bellah’s article about Memorial Day:
Until the Civil War, the American civil religion focused above all on the event of the Revolution, which was seen as the final act of the Exodus from the old lands across the waters. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were the sacred scriptures and Washington the divinely appointed Moses who led his people out of the hands of tyranny.

Then—The Civil War raised the deepest questions of national meaning. The man who not only formulated but in his own person embodied its meaning for Americans was Abraham Lincoln. For him the issue was not in the first instance slavery but “whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure.” … With the Civil War, a new theme of death, sacrifice, and rebirth enters the new civil religion. It is symbolized in the life and death of Lincoln. Nowhere is it stated more vividly than in the Gettysburg Address, itself part of the Lincolnian “New Testament” among the civil scriptures.

WANT SOME CELEBRATION IDEAS?

Over at Taste of Home magazine, associate editor Lesley Balla upped the ante with “70 Best Memorial Day Recipes.”

Parade has “35+ Patriotic Activities to Celebrate Memorial Day with Kids.”

Better Homes & Gardens describes “12 Things to Do for Memorial Day Weekend with Family and Friends”

Good Housekeeping has “21 Special Memorial Day Activities Your Family Can Do Together”

Country Living lists “33 Best Things to Do on Memorial Day for Kids and Adults.”

Mother’s Day: Celebrating Mothers, millions of American families gather in church

May 11, 2025 by Leave a Comment

“Arise, then, women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or of tears! Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.”

–Excerpted and adapted by Ken Sehested, from Julia Ward Howe’s “Appeal to Womanhood Throughout the World,” September 1870. (The first American attempts for a “Mother’s Day for Peace” arose in the 1870s, when Julia Ward Howe called on mothers to support disarmament in the Civil War and Franco-Prussian War)

SUNDAY, MAY 11: Happy Mother’s Day!

Express gratitude to Mom, Grandma or any maternal figure in your life on this, the second Sunday of May—celebrated in many of the world’s countries as Mother’s Day.

Did you know? Mother’s Day yields the highest U.S. church attendance after Christmas Eve and Easter. Most churches honor their congregation’s mothers in some way—with a special prayer, perhaps, or (in many congregations) with a flower.

mother's day gift with flowers

Photo by Zenspa1, courtesy of Flickr

A DAY FOR MOM: ANNA JARVIS

Although motherhood has been celebrated for millennia, the modern American version of Mother’s Day—the one we all know today—began in 1908 with Anna Jarvis. Determined to bring awareness to the vital role of each mother in her family, Jarvis began campaigning for a “Mother’s Day,” and finally was successful in reaching the whole country in 1914. Jarvis’s concept differed considerably from corporate interests in the holiday, however, and the over-commercialization of Mother’s Day was irritating to Jarvis as early as the 1920s. This year, in honor of the Mother’s Day centennial, honor Mom the way Jarvis intended: with a hand-written letter, a visit, a homemade gift or a meal, cooked from scratch.

Cooking Mom brunch? Look to Martha Stewart (for gift ideas, too!) and AllRecipes.

Though American observances honoring mothers began popping up in the 1870s and 1880s, Jarvis’s campaigns were the first to make it beyond the local level. The first “official” Mother’s Day service was actually a memorial ceremony, held at Jarvis’s church, in 1908; the 500 carnations given out at that first celebration have given way to the widespread custom of distributing carnations to mothers on this day. For Anna, the floral choice was easy: Carnations were her mother’s favorite flowers.

CYBELE, MOTHERING SUNDAY AND MOTHER’S DAY

While the modern observance of Mother’s Day began just a century ago, celebrations for women and mothers have been common throughout history. Greeks worshipped the mother goddess Cybele, while the Romans held the festival of Hilaria; Christians have observed Mothering Sunday for centuries, while Hindus have honored “Mata Tirtha Aunshi,” or “Mother Pilgrimage Fortnight.” The first American attempts for a “Mother’s Day for Peace” arose in the 1870s, when Julia Ward Howe called on mothers to support disarmament in the Civil War and Franco-Prussian War. Several decades later, Anna Jarvis created a holiday that became the Mother’s Day we know today.

Despite Jarvis’s best efforts, though, the commercialization of Mother’s Day was inevitable: Mother’s Day is now one of the most financially successful holidays on the American calendar.

Today, Mother’s Day is the most popular day of the year to eat out and to make phone calls. Yet it is with Mom in mind that Americans spend $2.6 billion on flowers annually for Mother’s Day; $1.53 billion on gifts; and $68 million on greeting cards.

US Postal Service invites all of us to celebrate Native American heritage with launch at annual Gathering of Nations Powwow

April 24, 2025 by Leave a Comment

But, there’s an overall mixed message in 2025—

While celebrating powwows—U.S. officials cancel efforts to show boarding school atrocities

By JOE GRIMM
Founder of the MSU School of Journalism Bias Busters series

THURSDAY, APRIL 24-26—There’s no question about this: The Gathering of Nations Powwow in New Mexico is the largest powwow in North America, bringing together over 3,000 dancers and singers from more than 750 tribes across the United States, Canada, and beyond.

But the federal government’s message in late April 2025 is more mixed.

On April 25, it released four new stamps commemorating Indian powwows.

However—about a week earlier, the Associated Press reported that the National Endowment for the Humanities had canceled $1.6 million in grants to capture and digitize records of the abuse and deaths of children in Indian boarding schools. The boarding school grants, just a few of many NEH cuts by the Trump administration, follow a federal investigation and apology by former President Joe Biden in October 2024.

For 150 years, the federal government sent Indigenous children away to the schools. They were made to stop using their native languages and faiths, were stripped of their cultures and beaten. Many were abused and died. An Interior Department investigation found that at least 973 Native American children died at the boarding schools. The report and outside researchers say there were more. 

Enactment of the Indian Child Welfare Act officially ended the forced assimilation policy in 1978. However,  the U.S. government did not fully investigate boarding schools until the Biden administration. Then, in April 2024, the NEH announced it was awarding $411,000 to more than a dozen tribal nations and organizations working to illustrate the impact of boarding schools. Most of those awards are now terminated. 

One project, by the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, was to  digitize more than 100,000 pages of boarding school records for its database. People use the site to find loved ones who were sent to boarding schools. Now, the National Endowment for the Humanities has issued a statement that the “grant no longer effectuates the agency’s needs and priorities.”

However, on April 25, the United States Postal Service dedicated its “Powwows: Celebrating Native American Culture” stamps in Albuquerque. The occasion is an auspicious one each year. The Gathering of Nations draws more than 100,000 attendees.

According to a Postal Service press release, chief customer and marketing officer and executive vice president Steven W. Monteith, said  it “takes great pride in our stamps and the unique opportunity they offer to tell the story of America. … We hope they inspire a deeper appreciation of Native American culture and influence all who see them.” 

The four stamps are from paintings by Cochiti Pueblo artist Mateo Romero

Care to learn more?

To learn more, see “100 Questions, 500 Nations: A Guide to Native America: Covering tribes, treaties, sovereignty, casinos, reservations, Indian health, education, religion, … and tribal membership.” It is part of the Bias Busters series, which includes guides about the religiously unaffiliated, Muslims, Jews, Latter-day Saints, Chaldeans, Sikhs and the Black Church with more on the way. All are on Amazon.

Click the cover to visit the book’s Amazon page.

 

 

Valentine’s Day: Americans to spend record $27.5 billion on international holiday of love

February 14, 2025 by Leave a Comment

Photo by alleksana, courtesy of Pexels

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 14: Hearts, expressions of love and sweet confections are flowing around the world today, marking the arrival of Valentine’s Day.

In ancient Rome, the fertility festival Lupercalia was observed February 13-15, although historians cannot document specific historical links between Lupercalia and the modern Valentine’s Day. For that matter, history doesn’t document any romantic association with Valentine’s Day until the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer.

The embers of courtly love began glowing in the High Middle Ages, and by the end of the 18th century, Valentine cards were being produced and exchanged. Through the decades, Valentines evolved from lace-and-ribbon trinkets to paper stationery to a holiday involving more expensive gifts, chocolates and, more recently, jewelry. The U.S. Greeting Card Association estimates that approximately 190 million valentines are sent in the United States each year (not including the inexpensive Valentine cards exchanged among schoolchildren).

Looking for a gift guide? Yahoo has 17 gifts that ‘prove you’re smooth, not scrambling’; the Guardian has ’34 thoughtful ideas they’ll actually want.’ Today.com offers ’20 best Valentine’s gifts in 2025,’ and InStyle has ’23 Valentine’s Day finds [that] will arrive just in time.’

For couples: In early 2014, Pope Francis released an appeal entitled “The Joy of ‘Yes’ Forever.” Intended for engaged couples but suitable for anyone who is married, this is a perfect read for Valentine’s Day! Read it here.

2025 stats: According to the National Retail Federation, 56 percent of Americans plan to celebrate Valentine’s Day this year; 28 percent of those not celebrating still plan to mark the occasion. Consumers are expected to spend a record $27.5 billion on Valentine’s Day this year, up from last year’s $25.8 billion and slightly above the previous record of $27.4 billion, set in 2020 (per person, that stat is $188.81).

THE ‘REAL’ ST. VALENTINE(S): A HISTORY AND A DOZEN

Through the centuries, Christians have honored nearly a dozen St. Valentines, so any research into the history of the “real” St. Valentine quickly veers toward confusion.

The Encyclopedia Britannica states that St. Valentine is the “name of two legendary martyrs whose lives seem to be historically based. One was a Roman priest and physician who suffered martyrdom during the persecution of Christians by the emperor Claudius II Gothicus and was buried on the Via Flaminia. Pope St. Julius I reportedly built a basilica over his grave. The other, bishop of Terni, Italy, was martyred, apparently also in Rome, and his relics were later taken to Terni. It is possible these are different versions of the same original account and refer to only one person.”

American Catholic magazine—one of today’s most popular sources of information for Catholic families—states: “Although the mid-February holiday celebrating love and lovers remains wildly popular, the confusion over its origins led the Catholic Church, in 1969, to drop St. Valentine’s Day from the Roman calendar of official, worldwide Catholic feasts. Those highly sought-after days are reserved for saints with more clear historical record. After all, the saints are real individuals for us to imitate. Some parishes, however, observe the feast of St. Valentine.”

So,  if conversation today heads in the direction of  the history of the “real” St. Valentine, you’re on solid ground to state the simple truth: “Yes, but no one knows for sure.”

FEBRUARY 14 AROUND THE WORLD

Albeit a relatively new addition to Asian culture, Valentine’s Day claims its biggest spenders in this region: Customarily, women in South Korea and Japan give chocolates to all male co-workers, friends and lovers on February 14, with men returning the favor two- or threefold on “White Day,” which occurs on March 14. Residents of Singapore spend, on average, between $100 and $500 on Valentine’s Day gifts, according to a recent report.

French and Welsh households commemorate Christian saints of love, and in Finland and Latin American countries, “love” extends to friends and friendships. Western countries most often acknowledge Valentine’s Day with greeting cards, candies and romantic dinner dates. However, in Islamic countries, many officials have deemed Valentine’s Day as unsuitable for Islamic culture.

VALENTINE RECIPES AND LINKS

Many tastes and traditions flow through our American Thanksgiving

November 28, 2024 by Leave a Comment

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 28: American Thanksgiving ushers in a host of annual traditions nationwide.

EDITOR’S NOTE:This year, we are asking our writers to send us memories of especially meaningful holidays. This story was sent to us by Joe Grimm, founder of the MSU School of Journalism Bias Bustersproject.

In 2010, I worked with students at Unis Middle School in Dearborn, Michigan. The project, for the Asian American Journalists Association, was to help the first Arab American students to grow up in a post-9/11 tell their stories.

After Thanksgiving, I asked the students whether they celebrated this American holiday—knowing that it was new to so many of their families.

They said, “Oh, we love Thanksgiving.”

“How do you celebrate?”

Their families cooked a turkey—not a ham, of course, as many were Muslim. Some crowded around a big spread set on a blanket. Others ate at tables. The main dish was accompanied by side dishes.

These families put out their traditional meze including hummus, garlicky baba ganoush, labneh with za’atar, fattoush or tabbouleh salads and stuffed grape leaves. Some added American standbys including cranberry sauce and maybe a Jell-O salad.

Depending on their background, families in other homes likely put out guacamole, latkes, samosas or dumplings.

We asked the Arab American students what they did to work off their meal. They said they played football or watched an NFL game.

So here it was: a unifying American tradition that unites people as they customize it to the literal tastes of their own culture, ethnicity or religion.

I now carry those memories I shared with those kids with me through my own family’s Thanksgiving observances each year.

Top 10 American Thanksgiving Events: A homecoming that has expanded into a week of observances

November 28, 2024 by Leave a Comment

Plan early, because there’s much more than Turkey Day!

“Let the gratitude you feel on Thanksgiving spill over into Giving Tuesday—and help us reimagine a world built upon shared humanity and generosity.” 
Annual reminder from the GivingTuesday movement

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 28: As November begins, are you mainly focused on planning a menu—and perhaps counting heads—for your family’s Thanksgiving dinner? Remember there’s a whole lot more on the calendar clustered around American Thanksgiving. A nearly week-long host of themes, events and cultural milestones are about to cascade across our communities nationwide.

10 Annual Thanksgiving-related events

Pre-Thanksgiving-dinner Turkey Trots are held nationwide for fun and often for charitable causes. As this custom has evolved, the lengths have shortened to allow more folks to take part in these fun family oriented events. But, this is no recent fad. The oldest continuously held annual footrace in America is the Buffalo Turkey Trot, where funds go to support the YMCA.

Community Thanksgiving Services once were more popular nationwide, but the numbers of these events have declined in recent years. Hoping to organize something yourself, this year? Depending on your religious affiliation, search online for Thanksgiving resources and you’re likely to find lots of ideas for organizing a local event. For example, Tricia Brown posted this list of Thanksgiving-church-related ideas for the United Methodist Church’s national website. The Calvin Institute of Christian Worship also has a helpful list of Thanksgiving-service-planning ideas.

Remembering Displaced Native American communities. If you are interested in these events, check local news media in early November and, also, determine if regional Native communities welcome outside participation in their events. These annual traditions are sometimes listed under phrases such as Nation Day of Mourning or Unthanksgiving Day.

Parades continue to be popular on and around Thanksgiving—many of them focused on welcoming the Christmas season. In fact, Wikipedia’s U.S. index of these events is called “Christmas and holiday season parades” so the list is a mixed bag of everything from “homecomings” to local Christmas festivals.

Football on Thanksgiving is a tradition that stretches way back into the 1800s, just after the Civil War. Wikipedia says the first such holiday game “took place in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on Thanksgiving Day of 1869, less than two weeks after Rutgers defeated Princeton in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in what is widely recognized as the first intercollegiate football game in the United States, and only six years after Abraham Lincoln declared the first fixed national Thanksgiving holiday in 1863.”

Thanksgiving television specials aren’t what they once were, now that “streaming” services have transformed television into a 24/7/365 matter of simply choosing what you want to see—whenever you want to see it. However, if you’re curious about the countless Thanksgiving-themed gems that have been broadcast, check out Wikipedia’s
List of Thanksgiving television specials You might re-discover a classic you’ll want to check out via streaming this year.

Black Friday as a semi-official kick off to the Christmas shopping season is both praised and criticized by American consumers—but, like those turkey trots, it’s not a new custom: This has been part of American culture for nearly a century and Thanksgiving-themed Christmas shopping was an especially important campaign during the Great Depression to try to prop up the sagging U.S. economy. Clearly the idea is spreading, though. In 2015, Amazon launched a second related annual event: “Black Friday in July.”

Small Business Saturday, a campaign to redirect shoppers from the giant retailers’ Black Friday “specials” into more “local” shops is not as well known. One reason for its lower profile is that the idea started as an ad campaign launched by American Express, which trademarked the name “Small Business Saturday.”

Cyber Monday is an e-commerce campaign focused on the Monday after Thanksiving.

Giving Tuesday is the last of these Thanksgiving-related events—popular enough now that it warrants its own extensive Wikipedia page.

Want to build momentum for one of these events? There are associated hash tags to share with friends across your preferred social media accounts. Or, this year, you could simply urge friends on social media to start following www.ReadTheSpirit.com for weekly updates of good news and, of course, information about upcoming holidays and festivals.

Have you seen green lights as Veterans Day approaches this year?

November 11, 2024 by Leave a Comment

By JOE GRIMM
Founder of the MSU School of Journalism Bias Busters project

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 11—If you’ve recently seen a green light in a doorway, at a business or a county building, you likely picked up on a message.

Operation Green Light for Veterans is a national campaign, driven by the the National Association of Counties and the National Association of County Veterans Service Officers .

The purpose is to show military veterans support and to highlight access to services.

The green light campaign is pegged to Nov. 4-11, around Veterans Day, which honors living men and women who have served in the military. Some supporters also show their green around Memorial Day in late May, which honors those who have died in the U.S. military.

A few light up the green year ’round. Often, someone places just a single green bulb near the entranceway to their home.

Learning more about our veterans

The proportion of adults in the country who are veterans has declined, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. It was about 18% in 1980 and 6% in 2022. The Veterans Administration projects that the number of veterans in the United States will decline by about a third over the next 25 years.

With the number of veterans declining, the need for information about them and their experience grows. You can learn about them in Michigan State University’s “100 Questions and Answers About U.S. Veterans: A Guide for Civilians.”

Origins of the observance

Honoring men and women who have served our country, in the shared hope that we might actually end wars someday, is a noble idea that dates to the origins of this Nov. 11 observance at the close of World War I. The world’s “Great War” officially ceased on June 28, 1919, but fighting had stopped seven months earlier, on Nov. 11—and thus, President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed Nov. 11, 1919 as the first Armistice Day. Nearly two decades later, November 11th was declared a legal holiday in the United States.

By 1954, the world had survived WWII and Korea, and a WWII vet began raising support for a more general Veterans Day. Among other arguments made in this campaign: WWII had required even more soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen than WWI. At the urging of citizens, November 11th officially became Veterans Day in 1954.

Did you know? France, Australia, Great Britain and Canada also commemorate the veterans of World War I and World War II on or near Nov. 11. In Europe, Great Britain and the Commonwealth countries, it is common to observe two minutes of silence at 11 a.m. every Nov. 11.