Author: haystack (23 Articles)

My good friend, and blogging “Daughter” Katie over at Towhnhall gave me this story yesterday…

Seems a man in Columbia Falls, Maine cares about and honors the memory of our fallen Heroes, and expresses it with honor and dignity.

Thanks for the story Katie.

With a big stetson to On Tap , we learn of Morrill Worcester who has, for the past fifteen years:

pack[ed] up a truckload of his Christmas wreaths and head[ed] down from Maine to Arlington National Cemetery. Without fanfare, he and a dozen or so volunteers would lay red-bowed wreaths on a few thousand headstones of fallen Americans.

Worcester is President of “Worcester Wreath”, a Christmas products business he started many years ago. According to the WaPo piece, when Worcester was 12 he won a trip to Washington DC as a paperboy, and:

Of all the monuments and memorials he saw, it was the visit to Arlington that stuck with him — the majesty and mystery, the sadness and the pride, the sight of all those neat rows of government-issue white headstones.

Years later, after he had started his Christmas products business, at the crunch point of one season Worcester asked some men who were building his new factory to find some wreaths and buy them for him.

They went a bit overboard: When Worcester heard that he was the proud owner of 4,000 wreaths that couldn’t possibly be sold by Christmas, he called a friend who owned a trucking company, contacted his senator in Washington and, two weeks before Christmas 1992, was at Arlington, laying wreaths.

It seemed like the right thing to do. So he continued the ritual each year, honoring those who had died so that he and other Americans might live as they saw fit.

Over the years this has grown from a quiet affair to one that will include hundreds of volunteers. Some of those attending will be members of the PatriotGuard Riders, who will accompany Worcester and the caravan that will take Route 1, and arrive around Dec. 14.

The event has grown so large that Worcester started a website so that others could do likewise at their local cemetries, more than 230 across America and the list continues to grow. The site, Wreaths Across America says this about 2006:

2006 will mark the 15th anniversary of holiday wreaths being sent from the State of Maine to Arlington National Cemetery. Each year the folks at Worcester Wreath Company make and decorate wreaths that will adorn over 5000 headstones of our Nation’s fallen heroes – in what has become an annual event coordinated with the Cemetery Administration and the Maine State Society.

Patriot, over at Soldiers Perspective himself a Veteran of OIF and one hell of a fine American, has a pointer to a video from Worcester’s website…take a minute to go over there and check it out.

See, you CAN find stories about civilians that show their honor and respect for our Soldiers past and present…you just have to look.

As the caption on the Wa Po says it, so shall I close here with this:

‘Rest easy, sleep well my brothers. Know the line has held, your job is done.’