Decoration Day Doin''s One of the most cherished of all high country traditions is the annual ritual known as Decoration Day or, in many cases, just Decoration. It combines piety, reverent remembrances of deceased family members, thorough cleaning of burying grounds, music that leans decisively in the direction of old-timey hymns such as "Rock of Ages" and "Amazing Grace," and some of the finest eating a body could want when the hour arrives for "dinner on the grounds." It is in a sense Memorial Day, albeit with a high country flair that makes Decoration Day distinctive. Limited almost exclusively to the southern Appalachians and Ozarks, the Decoration Day tradition is particularly strong in the rural highland regions of North Carolina. So much is this the case that a noted folklore expert, Alan Jabbour, who for many years served as director of the Library of Congress''s American Folklife Center, and his wife, Karen, have written a carefully researched book on the subject, Decoration Day in the Mountains: Traditions of Cemetery Decoration in the Southern Appalachians. While the book''s coverage does not gee-haw completely with my own experiences and recollections of the event, the differences are mostly minor in nature. They speak more to the fact that almost every cemetery where the tradition endures has some special type of celebration or approach to Decoration Day than to any errors on the part of the authors. The basic premises associated with Decoration Day include the following: (1) Preserving linkage to the past, especially among families and tight-knit communities, by setting aside one day each year, almost always a Sunday, for the event.

The preliminary work of sprucing up cemeteries by cleaning the grounds, raking or mounding graves, straightening or cleaning tombstones, filling in sunken graves, and the like usually occurs the previous day. The actual "decoration" (placing flowers on graves) takes place on Sunday. (2) Paying respect to familial links by making the event a celebration replete with food, prayer, and song. Sometimes a church homecoming and Decoration Day are combined, and the same holds true for family reunions. (3) Offering tribute to those who have gone before with fond recollections in the form of , vintage photographs, and, increasingly in the last two or three decades, exchanges of genealogical information. These activities combine to provide interested parties with not only a somber yetjoyous time but also greater familiarity with their family roots. Many gatherings will feature a gifted storyteller or two, and their offerings can evoke anything from solemn reflection to raucous laughter. Sometimes, especially in the case of small rural churches, organization of the special day is undertaken by the pastor, deacons, or other church leaders.

In other instances an extended family, group of families sharing a cemetery, or possibly an entire isolated community will be involved in planning the event. Often cemeteries where the Decoration Day tradition still holds sway provide year-round visual evidence of the function. This comes in the form of picnic tables (anything from simple sawhorse-and-plywood arrangements to elaborate wooden or concrete tables covered by a tin roof) located on an open, flat area adjacent to the cemetery. Similarly, there may well be a small shed where caretaking tools can be stored. Timing for Decoration Day varies, although it normally takes place sometime in late spring or early summer. More often than not it is on Memorial Day (which always comes on the last Monday in May) or quite close to it on the calendar, but the two are not the same. Decoration Day was a widespread practice before the concept of Memorial Day came into being, and its primary purpose is to honor all those who are buried in a given cemetery. By way of contrast, Memorial Day involves decorating gravesites of deceased military personnel.

It is sometimes colloquially known as Northern Decoration Day, an allusion to the practice having developed in the aftermath of the Civil War in connection with Union soldiers who died in the South. A few cemeteries actually hold more than one decoration event a year, usually in the spring and again in the fall, but this practice seems to be in rapid decline. For that matter, it is probably true that as we become an ever more urbanized society, the basic practice of Decoration Day as it has been known in the high country of the southern Appalachians is also on the wane. Contemporary Decoration Days sometimes, though not always, involve placing small flags at the resting places of veterans, but more traditional tributes include live flowers (often wildflowers picked near the cemetery), handcrafted crepe paper flowers, lovingly knitted or crocheted flowers, or in modern times plastic ones readily available not only from florists but also from big box and craft stores. These are placed atop or alongside all graves in the cemetery. Along with flowers (the literal "decorations"), other items emblematic of reverential memory might include removal of all vegetation from the grave mound, use of white stones or gravel to mark a site, or placement of tokens associated with an individual''s life (for example, fishing lures at the grave of an avid angler or spent shells at that of a dedicated hunter). Then there is the long-standing tradition of planting flowers (daffodils, iris, grape hyacinth, rambling roses, spirea, day lilies, and yellowbells are old mountain favorites) beside the grave or marking it with ornamental evergreens such as boxwoods, arbor vitae, or yucca. I personally find Decoration Day one of the most appealing of all high country traditions, even as I fear it will vanish before time''s remorseless ravages in decades to come.

The annual event offers a prime example of the importance of a favorite adage of historians: "You can''t know where you are going if you don''t know where you''ve been." Graveyards remind us of where we have been because they are the resting place of our families, a tangible link to our roots, and a testament to our abiding strength as mountain folks. They let us know, in the words of Thornton Wilder, "There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning." Those cemeteries, and their care, are our lasting link of love between these two lands . It is a linchpin of surpassing importance. As was so often the case, Ben Franklin captured the very essence of the matter when he wrote: "Show me your cemeteries and I will tell you what kind of people you have." If one believed Horace Kephart and his treatment of mountain cemeteries in Our Southern Highlanders, we are a miserable failure as a people and a culture. Yet it must be remembered that Kephart''s book was in many senses an extended exercise in stereotyping, written not so much to reflect reality but to sell preconceived notions of highland life to Northern readers.

Especially in the revised and expanded edition of 1922, he wandered far from the truth in many areas, but nowhere was he farther astray, nowhere was his depiction of mountain people more shameful, than in his descriptions of graveyards: "The saddest spectacle in the mountains is the tiny burial-ground, without a headstone or headboard in it, all overgrown with weeds, and perhaps unfenced, with cattle grazing over the low mounds or sunken graves." That is patently untrue, as is his suggestion that mountain folk in general show "a remarkable lack of reverence for the dead." Decoration Day offers a striking, richly praiseworthy statement to the contrary. So, for that matter, do individual markers and cemeteries across the Smokies, inside the Great Smoky Mountains National Park (GSMNP) and out. One would hope that future generations will continue to show just how wrong Kephart was. After all, this matter of honoring our forebears, one with roots reaching deep into the Appalachian past, is among our finest traditions. May it ever be so.