U.S. auto club AAA said in a travel forecast that 2023's Memorial Day holiday weekend could be “one for the record books, especially at airports,” with more than 42 million Americans projected to travel 80 kilometers or more.
But for Manuel Castañeda Jr., 58, the day will be a quiet one in Durand, Illinois, outside Rockford. He lost his father, a U.S. Marine who served in Vietnam, in an accident in California while training other Marines in 1966.
“Memorial Day is very personal,” said Castañeda, who also served in the Marines and Army National Guard, from which he knew men who died in combat. “It isn’t just the specials. It isn’t just the barbecue.”
But he tries not to judge others who spend the holiday differently: “How can I expect them to understand the depth of what I feel when they haven’t experienced anything like that?”
The holiday stems from the U.S. Civil War, which killed more than 600,000 service members — both Union and Confederate — between 1861 and 1865.
The first national observance of what was then called Decoration Day took place on May 30, 1868, after an organization of Union veterans called for decorating war graves with flowers, which were in bloom.
Someone has always lamented the holiday’s drift from its original meaning.
As early as 1869, The New York Times wrote that the holiday could become “sacrilegious” and no longer “sacred” if it focuses more on pomp, dinners and oratory.
In 1871, abolitionist Frederick Douglass feared Americans were forgetting the Civil War’s impetus — slavery — when he gave a Decoration Day speech at Arlington National Cemetery.
“We must never forget that the loyal soldiers who rest beneath this sod flung themselves between the nation and the nation’s destroyers,” Douglass said.
Memorial Day's potency diminished somewhat with the addition of Armistice Day, which marked World War I's end on Nov. 11, 1918. Armistice Day became a national holiday by 1938 and was renamed Veterans Day in 1954.
An act of Congress changed Memorial Day from every May 30th to the last Monday in May in 1971. Veterans objected: “They didn’t want to be just some random Monday that people could forget about,” Dennis said.
In 1972, Time Magazine said the holiday had become “a three-day nationwide hootenanny that seems to have lost much of its original purpose.”
The holiday also evolved alongside baseball and the automobile, the five-day work week and summer vacation, according to the 2002 book, “A History of Memorial Day: Unity, Discord and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
In the mid-20th century, a small number of businesses began to open defiantly on the holiday.
Once the holiday moved to Monday, “the traditional barriers against doing business began to crumble,” authors Richard Harmond and Thomas Curran wrote.
These days, Memorial Day sales and traveling are deeply woven into the nation's muscle memory, with supermarkets and DIY stores marking the holiday with big adverts hawking food and outside goods.
But Jason Redman, 48, a retired Navy SEAL who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, said he'll be thinking of friends he's lost. Thirty names are tattooed on his arm “for every guy that I personally knew that died.”