I can hear fireworks from my house, and recall reading about them in the paper earlier this week.
Am I alone in thinking it’s extraordinarily bizarre and not just a little tone-deaf to be having celebratory fireworks displays for Memorial Day?
I mean, this isn’t a happy holiday like the Fourth of July, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, etc… it’s our one somber, reflective national holiday.
Let’s move this over to IMHO.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Around here, people shoot off fireworks for practically everything now that they legalized all the cool stuff. It sounds like the middle of a war zone on July 4, but there are always fireworks going off every weekend during the summer, and more on anything resembling a holiday. And most people have no clue what Memorial Day is about anyway.
You’re correct.
Nah, it’s a day to celebrate reliably warm weather. The official purpose is clearly secondary to what the nation has chosen to observe. If the government wants there to be a mournful holiday, it should swap Memorial Day and Veterans Day (when the weather is too shitty for the living veterans to celebrate anything). Until then, ordinary people aren’t going to ruin a perfectly nice day off with sackcloth and ashes, regardless of any scolding about the Real Reason.
In our neck of the woods, where they are legal, fireworks season starts in mid-May, and runs through the end of September, with a resurgence around Christmas and New Years. The perennial question here is, “Was this fireworks or gunshots?”
There’s actually a perfectly good reason why they’re not switched; we set up Memorial Day in the post Civil War era, and then set up Veterans’ Day after WWI, to correspond with the various Armistice Day/Remembrance Day stuff in Europe, all of which was set up after that particular war.
And in some parts of the country, Memorial Day is kind of like the last hurrah of pleasant weather before it gets obnoxiously hot, and Veterans Day is kind of the last pleasant stretch before it starts getting too cold and rainy to be outside.
In particular I’m a little bit perplexed as to the appropriateness of fireworks in particular, not necessarily the warm weather/enjoyable holiday aspects. It seems kind of inappropriate, like holding commemorative diving and swimming competitions on the anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic or something.
Memorial Day is considered the unofficial start of summer by many. Since there’s no official start to summer anyway might as well go with it. It’s a holiday weekend, expect holiday behavior and events.
So yes, fireworks are absolutely necessary for Fireworks Day on July 4th when we celebrate Ben Franklin defeating the Russians in the South Pacific, but there’s nothing wrong with them on any other holiday.