By JUNE KINOSHITA
Waltham Times Contributing Writer

Photo from Wreaths Across America.

Every year on Dec.14, volunteers place donated holiday wreaths in cemeteries across the United States and overseas to honor military veterans. 

In Waltham, volunteers will place wreaths on veterans’ graves at Grove Hill Cemetery and Mount Feake Cemetery. 

The wreaths are sponsored by donations from the public to the nonprofit Wreaths Across America. To sponsor a wreath at Grove Hill, click here and for Mount Feake, click here.

The annual event began decades ago, when 12-year-old Morrill Worcester visited Arlington National Cemetery on a class trip to Washington, DC. The sight of hundreds of thousands of white gravestones and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, its eternal flame guarded around the clock by volunteers from the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment, left a deep impression. Later, as his life and business flourished, he never forgot how his good fortune rested in large part on the values of the nation and the sacrifice of generations of people who served in the military.

In 1992, Worcester, then the owner of a wreath company in Harrington, Maine, was faced with a surplus of holiday wreaths. He decided to donate them to honor the nation’s veterans. 

With the help of then-Maine Representative Olympia Snowe, he arranged for the wreaths to be shipped to Arlington and placed in one of the older sections of the cemetery, which received fewer visitors. A local trucking company offered to transport them to Virginia. Volunteers from the local American Legion and VFW Post as well as volunteers from the community decorated the wreaths with red bows. Members of the Maine State Society of Washington, D.C., helped to organize the wreath-laying, which included a special ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

In the decades that followed, word of Worcester’s wreath-laying spread to other regions and began to snowball. The Worcester family established Wreaths Across America to expand the effort. Its mission: Remember. Honor. Teach.

By 2022 Wreaths Across America and its national network of volunteers placed more than 2.7 million sponsored veterans’ wreaths on headstones of our nation’s service members at 3,702 participating locations. This was accomplished with the support of more than 5,000 sponsorship groups, corporation contributions and in-kind donations from the transportation industry across the country.

Thousands of cemeteries, including Arlington National Cemetery, participate in Wreaths Across America. However, the nonprofit has been criticized for buying wreaths exclusively from Worcester Wreath, a for-profit company owned by Morrill Worcester. The nonprofit’s executive director is Karen Worcester, wife of Morrill Worcester. According to the organization’s 2022 Form 990, Wreaths Across America received $554,797 in donations and nearly $32 million in gross receipts from admissions, merchandise sold or services performed, or facilities furnished in any activity that is related to the organization’s tax-exempt purpose.

This story has been updated to include information about the charity’s relationship to its founder’s for-profit business.

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