Weddingbee Blog

We took our pre-ceremony wedding photos in a park very near our house. This park is Central Memorial Park, and every year there is a Remembrance Day ceremony there.

I want with every cell in me to go to one of these services one day, but due to where it falls in the season, I haven’t had Remembrance Day off from work in the 5 years we’ve lived here. And I’ve needed to be at work at 11am for the past 5 Remembrance Days, too. Some years someone will take the lead and we’ll have a moment of silence. Sometimes not everyone in the building gets the message, and someone will start up the bandsaw in the shop while we’re standing onstage remembering, lest-we-forgetting. And even if we get a full minute of silence, we immediately get back to our work of make-believe. Some peoples jobs are saving this country, and mine involves dressing people up in funny clothes and making sure hijinks ensue.

There’s just something about Remembrance Day that makes me tear up at the first film I see of veterans standing (or sitting) tall at memorials, and the trumpeters never fail to make me bawl. It’s especially poignant to me because of my interest in WW II, and the very real fact that soon there will not be any veterans left from that war. I realize that we have many other veterans to be proud of, but WW II holds a special place in me. My two grandfathers were in Afghanistan and Egypt during WW II.

What do you do in honor of Remembrance Day?