Flag Day – June 14

Americans always look to Memorial Day and Independence Day to proudly fly our flag, and well we should. Did you know, though, that June has its own holiday to fly the flag? It’s the best day to fly our flag, because it’s Flag Day. The glorious banner that would so elegantly inspire Francis Scott Key to pen our national anthem 37 years later was adopted on June 14, 1777. It was a Saturday, and the fifth item on the agenda for the Congress was the flag. The journal of the Continental Congress records the event:

Resolved that the flag of the thirteen United States be Thirteen stripes alternate red and white: that the union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new constellation.

It wasn’t until 1885 that date was celebrated, and then by a young teacher. Bernard John Cigrand, only nineteen years old, was teaching in Waubeka, Wisconsin when he placed a 38-star flag in an inkwell on the “flag’s birthday” and asked his students to write essays about what the flag meant to them. Cigrand continued to lobby for the flag and a holiday to commemorate it until his death in 1932. President Harry S. Truman signed the holiday legislation in 1949, making it an official national holiday by an act of Congress.

So tell your kids about the flag today. Discuss its symbolism, its design evolution, and the brave that have been inspired by it for over 200 years. Make a flag, fly it proud, and celebrate freedom!