Washington – Every year for more than a decade, at the height of the season, Morrill Worcester would pack up a truckload of his Christmas wreaths and head down from Maine to Arlington National Cemetery. Without fanfare, he and a dozen or so volunteers would lay red-bowed wreaths on a few thousand headstones of fallen Americans.
There was no publicity. No crowds gathered. The gesture was one man’s private duty, born of a trip to Washington he won as a 12-year-old paperboy. Of all the monuments and memorials he saw, it was the visit to Arlington that stuck with the boy – the majesty and mystery, the sadness and the pride, the sight of all those neat rows of government-issue, white headstones.
Years later, after he had started his Christmas-products business, at the crunch point of one season, Worcester asked some men who were building his new factory to locate some wreaths and buy them for him.
They went a bit overboard: When Worcester heard that he was now the proud owner of 4,000 wreaths that couldn’t possibly be sold by Christmas, he called a friend who owned a trucking company, he contacted his senator in Washington and, two weeks before Christmas 1992, Worcester was at Arlington, laying wreaths.
It seemed like the right thing to do. So each year he continued the ritual, honoring those who had died so that he and other Americans might live as they saw fit.
Then, a few months ago, the e-mails started. A heart-wrenching yet elegant image of Wor cester’s wreaths, each adorned with a simple red ribbon, resting in front of seemingly endless rows of identical gravestones on a snowy day at Arlington. Beneath the photo, a few lines of poetry: “Rest easy, sleep well my brothers. Know the line has held, your job is done. Rest easy, sleep well …” And then one paragraph about Worcester’s pilgrimage.
The e-mail became an Internet phenomenon, forwarded so many times that the skeptics who spend their time checking out legends at Snopes.com mounted an investigation. Sure enough, this was the real deal.
On Dec. 10, Worcester will leave Columbia Falls, Maine, to lead the trailer full of wreaths down the coast. This time, there’ll be many more volunteers.
“It’s just my way to say thank you,” he says.
