BlackFive

"Rest easy, sleep well my brothers.

Know the line has held, your job is done.

Rest easy, sleep well . . . "

There are plenty of reasons to remember why we celebrate the holidays. We are happy to have a chance to be with family and friends at the end of another year. It also reminds us how blessed we are to have the bounty we do and the chance to enjoy it. Some folks take this time to make sure that the sacrifices that bought us this are recognized and remembered.

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.

Morrill Worcester is the man who started this and though he never served he wanted to show his respect for the fallen and to invite them and those who survived them to celebrate as well.

E very year for more than a decade, at the height of the season, Morrill Worcester would pack up a truckload of his Christmas wreaths and head 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.

There was no publicity. No crowds gathered. The gesture was one man's private duty, born of a trip to Washington he won as a 12-year-old paperboy. 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.

That's a good man.