The News from Bird Bottom Farm Traditional Holidays

The News from Bird Bottom Farm
Traditional Holidays

By Ursula B.G. Kilner, Salisbury

So much of the tradition of our holidays has been evaporated by making all but Christmas, New Year’s Day and the Fourth of July fall on the nearest Monday in order to give the poor working stiff a three-day weekend. The legislators may have done this with good intentions, but a day off in the middle of the week really has a special quality that the three-day weekend lacks. So we have Memorial Day on a Monday, and our calendars this year say "Memorial Day observed" on the 27th of May, and "Memorial Day traditional" on May 30. This year, those gardeners who put their "soft" plants in the ground on Memorial Day could well have been just a little too early for their plants’ protection from cold weather if they used the Monday date—those three days could well have made a big difference in whether their plants survived, or whether they would have to be moved back inside or covered with sheets of plastic (I have found that the protective sheets of plastic work better).

So in 2002 Memorial Day was celebrated on the 27th. But there is an aura about traditional holidays that gives us a feeling of permanence when the dates are kept the same each year. Who knows—"Christmas in July" (as a lot of sale ads proclaim) may well someday come about!

This year I did plant petunias on my husband’s mother’s grave too early—a week too early—and I fear they got frosted. I am the only one left to plant anything on her grave in Lebanon Springs, NY. Even though she died long before I met my husband, I feel a duty to decorate her grave, as there is no one else left who knew her or is related to her—at least not closer than California. As her second husband is buried in Arlington, that is where she wanted to be buried. But after he was killed in a car accident she married for a third time a few years later, so the powers in Washington said she couldn’t be buried with her second husband, as she had married again. (This makes me wonder about Jackie Kennedy Onassis—apparently rules are for some and not for others.)

The Cemetery of the Evergreens in Lebanon Springs has a section where Revolutionary soldiers are buried, and there are still plots that are unused today. One Memorial Day (I think it was when the holiday was still celebrated on the 30th of May) we met a family having a picnic in a large part of the cemetery in which the plots had been sold, but not yet used for burials. The family came from Albany and they lived in an apartment, so on Memorial Day they brought their picnic to the only land they owned—their cemetery plot in Lebanon Springs. Their story has pathos and pleasure and even practicality. They might as well enjoy their land while they are above ground, as they will enjoy it for a long time below ground.

My husband’s father, a West Point graduate and a retired general, died right after my husband graduated from college, and he had to take care of the arrangements at Arlington. As a consequence the funeral was a full-fledged procession with the black horses, boots reversed in the stirrups, drums sounding hollow because the snares had been removed, and then the Army Band bugler playing Taps. From that day on my husband stood at attention for Taps with tears streaming down his cheeks. Taps is a melody almost everyone knows, and most of us have sad memories attached to those few melancholy notes. When Taps is played at the end of Memorial Day parades most of us have cherished memories, but it would mean more were the day celebrated on the 30th of May instead of on a convenient Monday.