Every year on November 11, we pause for two minutes of silent tribute for the people who have served, and continue to serve, our country during times of war, conflict, and peace. It is observed across Canada each year on November 11 — the anniversary of the Armistice agreement of 1918 that ended the First World War.
The symbol of Remembrance Day is the red poppy, which grows on the First World War battlefields of Flanders (in Belgium) and northern France. As the artillery barrages began to churn the earth in late 1914, the fields of Flanders and northern France saw scores of red poppies appear.
During the terrible bloodshed of the second Battle of Ypres in the spring of 1915, Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae, a doctor serving with the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps, wrote of these flowers which lived on among the graves of dead soldiers:
“In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.”
– John McCrae
Following the First World War, a French woman, Madame E. Guérin, suggested to British Field-Marshall Earl Haig that women and children in devastated areas of France could produce poppies for sale to support wounded Veterans. The first of these poppies were distributed in Canada in November of 1921, and the tradition has continued ever since, both here and in many parts of the world.
In Canada, we wear them as reminders of the horrors of conflict and the preciousness of the peace they fought hard to achieve. The Poppy campaign raises funds to support veterans and their families.
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