Memorial Day

Memorial Day 2026 is on Monday, May 25. The holiday has been observed annually on the last Monday in May since 1971. Prior to that, Memorial Day fell on May 30 each year with few exceptions. The date change was the result of the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, passed in 1968 to create three-day weekends for federal employees.

The Civil War, which ended in the spring of 1865, claimed more lives than any conflict in U.S. history and required the establishment of the country’s first national cemeteries. By the late 1860s, Americans in various towns and cities had begun holding springtime tributes to these countless fallen soldiers, decorating their graves with flowers and reciting prayers.

It is unclear exactly where this tradition originated; numerous different communities might have independently initiated the memorial gatherings. Some records show that a group of formerly enslaved people in Charleston, South Carolina, organized one of the earliest Memorial Day commemorations less than a month after the Confederacy surrendered in 1865. A year earlier, three women in Pennsylvania had decorated soldiers’ graves in their town.

Nevertheless, in 1966, the federal government declared Waterloo, New York, the official birthplace of Memorial Day. Waterloo—which first celebrated the day on May 5, 1866—was chosen because it hosted an annual, community-wide event, during which businesses closed and residents decorated the graves of soldiers with flowers and flags.

On May 5, 1868, Major General John A. Logan, leader of an organization for Union Civil War veterans, called for a nationwide day of remembrance later that month. “The 30th of May, 1868, is designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers, or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village and hamlet churchyard in the land,” he proclaimed.

He called the occasion Decoration Day in a nod to the tradition of decorating soldiers’ graves that he sought to popularize. The date was chosen because it wasn’t the anniversary of any particular battle. Late May also allowed for “the choicest flowers of springtime” to be available across the country, Logan reasoned.

On the first Decoration Day, General James Garfield made a speech at Arlington National Cemetery. Around 5,000 people attended and decorated the graves of the 20,000 Civil War soldiers buried there with small American flags.

Many Northern states held similar commemorative events and reprised the tradition in subsequent years; by 1890, each one had made Decoration Day an official state holiday. Southern states, on the other hand, continued to honor the dead on separate days until after World War I.

Gradually, Decoration Day came to be known as Memorial Day. That’s reflected in the 1887 law that Congress passed declaring ‘“Memorial” or “Decoration Day”’ to be a holiday for all government employees. The next year, the legislature passed another law making the occasion a holiday for everyone in Washington, D.C.

Memorial Day originally honored only those lost while fighting in the Civil War. But during World War I, the United States found itself embroiled in another major conflict, and the holiday evolved to commemorate American military personnel who died in all wars. This grew to include fallen soldiers from World War II, the Vietnam War, the Korean War and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

During the mid-20th century, Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower followed the lead of earlier commanders-in-chief by issuing proclamations that encouraged Americans to observe Memorial Day, which was still not a national holiday. In 1950, Truman called for Memorial Day to “henceforth be dedicated also as a day for Nation-wide prayer for permanent peace.” He also initiated an hour of prayer, focused on promoting peace, to begin at 11 a.m. EDT on the unofficial holiday.

Finally, in 1971, Memorial Day became a federal holiday across the country thanks to a law Congress had passed two and a half years earlier.

Cities and towns across the United States host Memorial Day parades each year, often incorporating military personnel and members of veterans’ organizations. Some of the largest parades take place in Chicago, New York and Washington, D.C.

Americans also observe Memorial Day by visiting cemeteries and memorials. Some people wear a red poppy in remembrance of those fallen in war—a tradition that began with a World War I poem.

On a less somber note, many people take weekend trips or throw parties and barbecues on the holiday, perhaps because Memorial Day weekend—the long weekend comprising the Saturday and Sunday before Memorial Day and Memorial Day, itself—unofficially marks the beginning of summer.