Honor guard leads wreath convoy to Va. 5,000 donated Christmas decorations bound for veterans’ Arlington graves

HARRINGTON – It’s not often that Christmas decorations get an honor guard.

But at noon Sunday, more than 20 vehicles formed a convoy with a tractor-trailer as it drove away from a small manufacturing facility on North Street and headed down Route 1 toward the nation’s capital.

As the big rig pulled out from beneath an enormous American flag flapping in the wind, trucks from area fire departments led the way with lights flashing and sirens blaring while pickup trucks flying patriotic flags fell into line.

It’s not so much that the tractor-trailer was loaded with more than 5,000 wreaths made by Worcester Wreath Co. as it was a matter of where the wreaths are headed.

For the 15th consecutive year, the family-owned wreath company is donating the wreaths to Arlington National Cemetery, where they will be placed on the tombstones of America’s war dead.

Although he’s been doing this every year since 1992, Morrill Worcester said Sunday that the company he founded 35 years ago is getting more attention this year than ever for the donation, thanks to the Internet.

Worcester spoke in a small office in his company’s plant as more than 200 volunteers helped out at the facility, tieing red bows on each wreath, bagging them, packing them in boxes, and then loading them onto the tractor-trailer.

Ever since photos of the wreaths on the graves started being posted online for all the wired world to see, he’s been getting more and more calls from strangers asking him about it, Worcester said.

Maybe that’s why over the past several days, he said, he’s granted interviews not just to Maine media outlets but also to NBC Nightly News, USA Today and television networks from Japan, Germany and Australia.

“It just went wild,” Worcester said. “It went around the world.”

So wild, in fact, that the company is pushing its efforts to an unprecedented scale this year. Worcester Wreath Co., with the help of the Civil Air Patrol, has started a campaign called Wreaths Across America, in which wreaths will be ceremonially laid at more than 230 state and national cemeteries and veterans monuments across the country on Dec. 14.

Worcester said he is grateful for the increased publicity his wreath donation program is getting this year because he wants all veterans, dead and alive, to receive attention for the service they have paid their country.

“We kind of want to wake up the country, really, for what the veterans have done for us,” Worcester said. “If you can’t be at a ceremony, just take a minute to think of the veterans.”

A group of veterans has decided to show Worcester that they, in turn, appreciate what he’s been doing.

The Patriot Guard Riders, a veterans’ motorcycle club known for providing escorts at military funerals, will be leading the truck as it makes it way down the East Coast to Arlington.

According to Norway resident John O’Leary, who heads up the Riders’ Maine chapter, the convoy is expected to arrive at the cemetery the morning of Dec. 14. At noon that day, he said, there with be wreath-laying ceremonies at Arlington and at 230 other cemetery and memorial sites nationwide.

“This is probably one of the biggest things we’ve done,” O’Leary said, standing in a hallway at the wreath company’s offices. “It’s [a feeling] I’ve personally not had since the Vietnam War, and I don’t think the country has either.”