(MassLive/The Republican) Despite a winter weather advisory for Saturday morning, the sun broke through threatening clouds as hundreds of people spread out across the Massachusetts Veterans Memorial Cemetery at Agawam, Christmas wreaths in hand, placing one at each of the more than 9,000 headstones.
The crowd at Agawam was one of more than 3,700 similar gatherings at veterans’ cemeteries, American battle monuments, and religious and municipal cemeteries around the world to place wreaths on the graves of those who served their country on Wreaths Across America Day.
“We are not here to decorate graves,” location coordinator Paul Barabani told the crowd. “We are not here to remember (veterans’) deaths, but their lives.”
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State Sen. John C. Velis, D-Westfield, carried his 11-month-old son in one hand and two wreaths in the other. Little Carson isn’t ready to read the names out loud yet, but Velis said them for him as he leaned the wreaths against the headstones of Arthur Andrews and George McClure. When not at the State House in Boston or being a new dad, the senator is known as Maj. Velis in the Army Reserve. Before that, he served two combat tours in Afghanistan. He said the latest statistics indicate that fewer than one-half of one percent of eligible citizens volunteer for the armed forces.
“I am a first-time dad and I’ve got a young son, and a big part of this day is teaching. The only way that young men and women are going to continue to raise their hands and volunteer to go fight is if we honor those who have fallen before them,” he said. “My wife and I have come to this every year, but now that we are parents the ‘teach’ part” took on a whole new level of resonance today.”
“For me it was important to get my son Carson out here to show him, to have him touch the wreaths, to have him see it. We can’t say the name, but I can say the name to him. He can see what it is all about.”