Talking Southern – Yankee Memorial Day

 That is not a derisive term, truly; it is just what your compiler used to hear folks of his grandparents’ generation say to differentiate their springtime holidays.  Confederate Memorial Day, which was held on April 26^th each year and widely celebrated for perhaps the first three quarters of the twentieth century, was usually referred to simply as “Memorial Day,” so the national holiday of remembrance near the end of May needed a different name.

    It once had another title:  Decoration Day, which is what it was called from the Reconstruction period till sometime after the end of the Second World War.  A day on which graves of veterans were decorated with flowers and American flags, it became widely celebrated, particularly in the years following the First World War.  While Decoration Day was not officially retitled nationally as “Memorial Day” until the early 1970s, most folks in the U.S. had long before adopted “Memorial Day” as its nom courant. But since we already had a Memorial Day in the South, many older folks just started calling the old Decoration Day, “Yankee Memorial Day.”

     Your compiler thought Yankee Memorial Day was a Fayette County term until 1989, when he and his young bride, who then lived in Athens, Georgia,  invited the dear old widow with whom his parents had boarded a generation before, to dine with them on the last Monday in May.   Her name was Mrs. W. W. (Julia Bradwell) Howell, she lived from 1909 until 1995, and she was gentility and refinement personified – Old Athens to the core.  Her paternal grandfather had been president of the State Normal School there, and she herself had been educated at the city’s pre-eminent girls’ finishing school, The Lucy Cobb Institute, before matriculating at the University of Georgia.   Your complier’s parents had boarded a generation before with Mr. and Mrs. Howell in their lovely old home at 180 Milledge Circle in that fair city while finishing college.

     A couple of days after that Memorial Day 1989 supper gathering, a thank-you note arrived at your compiler’s house, inscribed in Mrs. Howell’s flowing Lucy Cobb hand on engraved linen bond.  In it, she mentioned that the get-together had been such a nice way for Southern friends to celebrate Yankee Memorial Day.  Reading that, your compiler realized that Yankee Memorial Day was a term in broader usage than he had previously realized.

     Keeping his ears open, he heard it a few more times over the next several years, but soon the generation who used the term began to pass from the earthly scene.  Your compiler doubts that anyone refers to it as Yankee Memorial Day anymore, which is probably not a bad thing, but he thought he would resurrect the old term one more time for Memorial Day 2025, nevertheless.

    So whatever you want to call it, have a happy one; however, please remember it is not really a celebration – your compiler always shudders at what he strongly believes is the inappropriateness of Memorial Day fireworks – but rather a remembrance of the sacrifices of those who have given their lives to preserve our freedom in this great nation.