No, actually he’s from Regina originally. 
Go Doug!!!
I’m happy to wait until after November 5th to wear mine - it doesn’t quite go with the whole Bonfire Night, gunpowder plot theme.
This morning I blew the Last Post and Reveille twice in different churches, and I’m doing it again this afternoon. At the second service they read out the names of the crews of two US bombers that accidentally collided over the village in 1945, as well as the local names. (The sermon made mention of the Thankful Villages - English villages that got back all the men they sent off to the 1914-18 war. Out of 16,000+ villages in the country, there are just over forty Thankful Villages.)
We also sang O Valiant Hearts for the first time I can remember in getting on for thirty years. Call me a sentimental old bugger, but I teared up several times during that one.
They shall grow not old, and all that.
What was his full name?
Wow. Thank you. In today’s world, it makes me happy when someone refuses to shit on someone else’s beliefs, etc, in the name of “keeping it real” or “I gotta be me.”
Sadly, I haven’t seen any vets at my Trader Joe’s, which is where I usually get my poppies. I generally buy 20- why get change, when I can’t think of anything better to spend that $18 or $19 on?
I wore mine of course. Two Americans asked me what it was. The Saudis I understand, but Americans?
I also thought Quebeois when it was spelled Canadien.
Thanks, Featherlou. And nope, you’re supposed to stick it in the ceiling or visor on your car, so it’s always there! I feel weird without one. And our services at Consulate are going on right now, and I am not there.
I don’t know about this year, but BBC policy in the past was to allow people appearing on TV to wear them, or not, as they wished. The problem was that anyone who appeared on TV in the run-up to 11 Nov and *didn’t *wear one was guaranteed to get hate mail. The result is as you see - people wearing them at least partly in self defence.
I think we’re up to poppy #6 in the Mudd household.
As for pacifism, a friend commented on my poppy the other day with a disapproving tone and went on to explain that she was “anti-war.” Me too, jeez. I will never understand how some people can equate remembrance with a pro-war position. Who walks away from the cenotaph feeling like rushing into another war?
I wonder who was sending this hate-male. Was it the Provisional Wing of the British Legion ?
I’ve never heard of it until here, my first year in Canada.
Just observed a minute of silence (well, some seconds of silence, but it’s the thought that counts, right?)
I can’t hear “The Last Post” without tearing up.
Want to hear something mildly freaky, Ginger? I bought a poppy for you last night and pinned it on my jacket on the side opposite from the one I’ve been wearing for days, and made a little joke about having matching poppies on, and by the time we got to the car (a block away), I looked down and saw that your poppy was my only poppy now. It’s like they know, you know? 
(That’s it, Larry. It’s perfectly logical to me for pacifists to be very much pro-remembrance.)
John Snow on C4 has blogged about his reasons for not wearing one.
I think as soon as you are “expected” to wear a poppy, you lose the very thing that the soldiers fought for (to a degree).
I’m sure the troops would rather you wore a poppy in your heart all year round, and acted on that basis.
In November 2003 Jonathan Ross forgot to wear a poppy during some segments of his Film programme for the BBC.
The errant flower was consequently added to the Ross lapel by studio technicians versed in the arts of virtual floristry.
It is an extremely common tradition in Canada, where in some of the provinces, (not including Ontario) Remembrance Day is also observed. Being in Ottawa, if you go down to the National War Memorial today, one other thing that you would note about the poppies is that a tradition has also developed of many people removing their poppies from their lapels and leaving them at the memorial.
I was in Ieper five years ago, where the fire brigade band hold a Last Post ceremony every evening under the arches of the Menin Gate. While they were playing The Day Thou Gavest, Lord, Is Ended, there was a woman not many yards from me bawling her eyes out, and I mean as in having to be helped to stand up. I didn’t blame her.
Yes. Or watches, say, the Royal British Legion Festival of Remembrance on TV and sees the poppy petals falling like crimson snow, on and on seemingly without count, one petal for each life?
"Did the band play The Last Post and chorus?
Did the pipes play The Flow’rs of the Forest? "
Excerpt from "Willie McBride
Song gets me every time. Every. damn. time.
It’s played every Remembrance Day on our local CBC station.
Never ever forget.
What do you mean, ‘not including Ontario’? I marched in a heck of a lot of Sudbury blizzards and stood statue-still with a rifle on my boot for a lot of unpleasantly cold ceremonies for a day that’s not observed.
Unless you just mean it’s not a statutory holiday that people get off work. It’s not, in Ontario, but this is more to keep the kids in school where you can give them a lecture about history or bus them to the municipal service instead of letting them sit home and play video games all day. Or at least this is he reasoning I heard.
Yeah, this seems to happen mostly in Ottawa. I don’t go for it. Firstly, it leaves me poppyless for the rest of the day (and thus potentially out of uniform), secondly, it’s wasteful in that these poppies can’t get reused in later years, and third, while actual flowers might wilt and rot and blow away, these just become crimson litter. (Pointy trash to be blowing about in the wind, too.)
I was living in Flanders in 2004, and sat in on a ceremony in the Ieper cathedral with music from the Band of the Royal Belgian Navy. I think “Song of the Liberation” was the one that struck me the most. Some of those Belgian cities really got the worst imaginable in WWI.
World War One. “The Great War”, the unbelievable waste and horror, the “War to End All Wars”, and now we have to give it a number. 
There was a nice ceremony at Disneyland today, actually. We stopped for the last of it and my five year old sang a rousing"God Bless America."
Not only did they have all of the armed forces represented, but they were also honoring all the park employees who are vets. They got a nice standing ovation.
I grew fond of the poppy over the course of my periodic dealings with Canadian provincial governments, when on ocassion I had to be up north close to the 11th. It being however “alien” to these here parts, I have to go grade-school style and craft one by myself if I want to pin it. Paul, I am afraid that in the American culture, even among the military, it is becoming relegated to some quaint thing the Old Guys picked up over there. Today I was asked what it was by a US Army Master Sergeant and by the head of the PR House’s Veterans’ Affairs Commmittee (whom I had told before!). I think there’s three people in my everyday workplace that knew what it meant before I wore it; even sadder is that in the case of those who bother to ask what is it, I get the eyes glazed over thing before I get five words through.