Our day is Memorial Day, in late May, which dates from the end of the Civil War. Many of the same customs attached to Armistice Day in other countries attach to Memorial Day in the US.

I am old enough to remember Armistice Day before its transformation... in grade school, we still stood for a moment's silence at 11:11 on 11/11.

For Veterans Day this year, I concatenated the two streams of tradition Mary Anne tells about, and visited the Texas Civil War Museum (west of Fort Worth). They have a surprisingly large collection of artifacts and uniforms from both sides of the conflict, in cases that face each other from opposite sides of each gallery. Battles in which Texans fought are mentioned, but are neither mapped nor represented in painting or photograph. The concentration, instead, is on the individual soldier and his life during wartime.

I suppose this is due, at least in part, to those battles having been in Virginia and Tennessee. No major engagements were fought on Texas soil, though the last skirmish of the war occurred near the town of Brownsville (on the Mexican border) a month after Appomattox, before news of the CSA's surrender had reached that far. Federal forces never successfully invaded, so Texas did not suffer the devastation that Virginia and Georgia did... and, since it was mostly still frontier, Texas prospered from a flood of new post-war settlers. "Reconstruction" as practiced in the East didn't even get a mention in the film.

The exhibit includes a short documentary, done in the style of Ken Burns, from which I learned quite a lot, including the above parapgraph. It also reinforced an impression I've mentioned here before: Texans have a loyalty, or patriotism if you will, to their own country, higher (or deeper) than to whichever collection of states it belongs at the time. It is even evidenced in their local variations on the Confederate flag: one lone star was always made prominent among the others.