Why Do People Wear Red Poppies on Remembrance Day?

Read Time:12 Minute, 20 Second Every November, in Canada, Britain, Australia and a long list of other countries, people pin a small red paper flower to their coat. Then, at eleven in the morning on the eleventh day, they stop. Traffic slows. Shops go quiet. Two minutes of silence, and the flower sits over the heart the whole time. If you grew up with it, you may never have asked why. If you did not, it looks a little strange: millions of adults wearing the same flower on the same week, for a war that ended more than a hundred years ago. So why do people wear red poppies on Remembrance Day? The honest answer is a chain of four things: a battlefield, a doctor, a seed, and a question a child asks. Why Do People Wear Red Poppies on Remembrance Day? Start With the Battlefield In the spring of 1915, the fields around Ypres, in the Flanders region of Belgium, had been shelled, dug, trenched and buried in for months. The ground was torn open. Very little should have grown there.

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