Armistice Day (better known as Veterans Day)

History tells us that this day became a noteworthy one due to the cessation of hostilities between the parties involved in World War I (also known as "The Great War"). Troops on all sides silenced their weapons on 11/11/18, quite poetically "at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month" of 1918, though the Treaty of Versailles which "officially" ended the war was not officially signed until June 28, 1919. The United States Congress recognized this on June 4, 1926 and in 1938 11/11 became an official Federal holiday. Bells were rung each year at 11:00 a.m. on 11/11 in honor of the Armistice; it has been described by the author Kurt Vonnegut, who was a POW during World War II, thus:

When I was a boy all the people of all nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month. It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind. Armistice Day has become Veteran's Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veteran's Day is not... Armistice Day I will keep. I don't want to throw away any sacred things.

On June 1, 1954, after cessation of hostilities in the "police action" known to us in the USA as the Korean War, President Eisenhower amended the holiday from "Armistice Day" to "Veterans Day." I am inclined to believe as Vonnegut did that the day should be made sacred once again--and never should have lost as much of its symbolism as it evidently has since the early 1950s.