For all my life, I have watched the majority of people in Appalachia spend a great deal of money, often money they don't really have available for trivial spending, for flowers to decorate graves on Memorial Day. Let me say, first and foremost, I have nothing against Memorial Day or the reasons for it. But the waste of much needed money to decorate graves, often the graves of distant relatives, relatives the buyer never actually knew, relatives they didn't really like or get along with, is simply waste, unwise spending, and spending which never should take place. I haven't spent money on grave decoration in many years, not because I can't afford it, but because it is wasteful. I honestly believe that my own parents and grandparents, now long dead, would tell me if they could that they would rather see me put my money to rational uses in my own family, never put flowers on their graves, and live a useful, productive, honest life in tribute to the things they taught me while they were living in the case of my parents and maternal grandparents, whom I knew, and in the case of the paternal grandparents whom I never met since they were both dead more than ten years before I was born.
I have seen at least one of my siblings spend money they did not have, could not afford, and should not have spent, to decorate numerous graves every year of their life. I am certain that sibling's children are doing the same thing. I grew up in a large extended family in which both sets of my grandparents and my father raised large numbers of children under tough, but not totally poverty stricken circumstances. My paternal grandparents raised ten children in a log house in the head of a hollow in Mousie, Kentucky. They farmed, hunted, fished, and did whatever was necessary to raise those ten children and I never heard my father or any of my aunts or uncles ever say they went hungry once in their lives. My maternal grandparents raised eight children to adulthood and lost two as small children. They were poor but never hungry according to the stories I heard from my mother, grandparents, and aunts and uncles. It took several years for my maternal grandparents to rake and scrape to save enough money to buy a small subsistence farm of their own but their children never went hungry due to the hard work of the entire family. My father raised nine children from his two marriages and worked in the log woods, coal mines, and farmed until he got together enough money in his fifties to buy a small country store when his first wife grew too ill from an unspecified neurological disease to care for a home and the one son they still had at home. My father remarried to my mother who had one daughter at the time and they subsequently had me and raised us both to adulthood in the country store which he built after he decided to move from his first location. I never had a hungry day in my life. I am certain my parents and grandparents would tell me to save my money, put it to good use in my own family, and not waste it on Memorial Day flowers for their graves. What about your own Appalachian ancestors? What would they say to you about Memorial Day flowers if they could?
