Take time today to remember those who sacrificed

Memorial Day is a U.S. holiday that's supposed to be about mourning the nation's fallen service members, but it's come to anchor the unofficial start of summer and a long weekend of travel and discounts on anything from mattresses to lawn mowers.

Iraq War veteran Edmundo Eugenio Martinez Jr. said the day has lost so much meaning that many Americans "conflate and mix up Veterans Day, Memorial Day, Armed Forces Day, July Fourth." Social media posts pay tribute to "everyone" who has served, when Memorial Day is about those who died.

For him, it's about honoring 17 U.S. service members he knew who lost their lives.

"I was either there when they died or they were soldiers of mine, buddies of mine," said Martinez, 48, an Army veteran who lives in Katy, Texas, west of Houston. "Some of them lost the battle after the war."

Steve Merando, who has marched in Cold Spring's Memorial Day parade since he was 10 years old, agreed. "People forget that Memorial Day is supposed to be a memorial to those who were killed in action while serving their country," said Merando, who served with the U.S. Navy Seabees from 1969 to 1973, including in Vietnam and Thailand. He played Little League baseball with Keith Livermore, one of three Philipstown residents killed in the Vietnam War.

In Memoriam: Philipstown and Beacon

Here is a look at the holiday and how it has evolved:

When is Memorial Day?

It falls on the last Monday of May, which this year is May 26.

In Cold Spring, a parade will begin at 9 a.m. at Stone and Main streets and progress to Cold Spring Cemetery in Nelsonville for a ceremony. Hot dogs and refreshments will follow at the American Legion. Rain or shine.

In Beacon, a ceremony will be held at 11 a.m. at 413 Main St. It will include the dedication of a plaque to mark the 100th anniversary of the Veterans Memorial Building, which was completed in 1925.

Why is Memorial Day celebrated?

It's a day of reflection and remembrance of those who died while serving in the U.S. military. The holiday is observed in part by the National Moment of Remembrance, which encourages all Americans to pause at 3 p.m. for a moment of silence.

What are the origins of Memorial Day?

The holiday's origins can be traced to the American Civil War, which killed more than 600,000 service members - both Union and Confederate - between 1861 and 1865.

The first national observance of what was then called Decoration Day occurred on May 30, 1868, after an organization of Union veterans called for decorating war graves with flowers, which were in bloom.

The practice was already widespread. Waterloo, New York, in Seneca County, began a formal observance on May 5, 1866, and was later proclaimed to be the holiday's birthplace.

Yet Boalsburg, Pennsylvania, traced its first observance to October 1864. And women in some Confederate states were decorating graves before the war's end.

David Blight, a Yale history professor, points to May 1, 1865, when as many as 10,000 people, many of them Black, held a parade, heard speeches and dedicated the graves of Union dead in Charleston, South Carolina.

A total of 267 Union troops had died at a Confederate prison and were buried in a mass grave. After the war, members of Black churches buried them in individual graves.

"What happened in Charleston does have the right to claim to be first, if that matters," Blight told the Associated Press in 2011.

When did Memorial Day become a source of contention?

As early as 1869, The New York Times wrote that the holiday could become "sacrilegious" and no longer "sacred" if it focused more on pomp, dinners and oratory.

In an 1871 Decoration Day speech at Arlington National Cemetery, abolitionist Frederick Douglass said he feared Americans were forgetting the Civil War's impetus: enslavement.

"We must never forget that the loyal soldiers who rest beneath this sod flung themselves between the nation and the nation's destroyers," Douglass said.

His concern...