Dear Editor:
I was working at a trade show one year with some salespeople who were Americans.
Because it was November, we were wearing our poppies to commemorate the upcoming Remembrance Day. When one of the American salespeople came up to me and asked what was with the poppies, I was taken aback. I explained to him that it was for remembering those who have fallen in battle in the World Wars and the to remember all others who had made the ultimate sacrifice in wars that followed after that.
He nodded and said that of course they also celebrated Remembrance Day in the states but do not wear poppies. We surmised that is a Canadian thing. It is actually a British thing.
After looking it up I learned that the idea of wearing a poppy in Canada was in recognition of the poppies that grew in the fields specifically in the Western front, and are only worn by the British and other confederacies like Canada.
Poppies were immortalized in the poem by Canadian doctor John McCrae In Flanders Fields, which he wrote while serving in Ypres in 1915 as he watched the fields being torn up by shells and leaving behind the fallen poppies.
Artificial poppies were first sold in Britain in 1921 to raise money for the Earl Haig Fund in support of ex-servicemen and the families of those who had died in the conflict. They were supplied by Anna Guérin, who had been manufacturing the flowers in France to raise money for war orphans.
Selling poppies proved so popular that in 1922 the British Legion founded a factory – staffed by disabled ex-servicemen – to produce its own. It continues to do so today.
Today poppies are sold in Canada to support the veterans and families as part of the Canadian Legion.
Pat Stornebrink,
Belwood