How Do You Keep A Poppy From Falling Off During Remembrance Day Week?

There are few things more perplexing to mankind: how do you keep a poppy on for the week or two period spanning Remembrance Day? Just about anyone who’s ever purchased one of the red lapel pins has been faced with the dilemma of looking down and finding it’s somehow fallen off.

How can you stop it? To find out, CityNews.ca went to the source – the Canadian Legion in Ottawa. That’s where communications director Bob Butt offered these practical suggestions:

“If people weave the pin in, it shouldn’t fall off,” he explains. “Instead of just sticking it in once or twice, stick it into the fabric four or five times. The other option is to put something on the back to keep it from slipping off. You can put a piece of tape on or a piece of rubber off an eraser. Or you can bend the pin up.”

Why don’t they just use a better pin? “It becomes extremely expensive and we’re not out to cost people more money.”

But he admits he has no solution to the problem of the black centre falling out.

Here are some other things you may never have known about the poppy:

Wearing it properly
“Protocol is the left side above the heart,” Butt points out. 

What happened to the green centre?
Therein hangs a tale. They were in circulation for five or six years but were removed in favour of the more traditional black model. Butt calls them an ‘honest mistake.’ “Somebody thought the centre should stand for the green fields of France. But … the actual centre of the poppy is black.” Why did it take so long to correct it? Butt claims it’s a big organization and change is a slow process.

How many do they sell a year?
The Legion estimates it distributes an astounding 18 million poppies a year to chapters across the country. They can’t say how many are actually sold annually, but the number is likely to be in the millions, with the profits going to individual legions.

Poppy history
It’s said to actually stretch back to the Napoleonic Wars. A 19th century writer is believed to have made the observation that the bright red flower, the colour of blood, seemed to sprout on the formerly barren fields after the battles had ended.

In 1915, Canadian Lt.-Col. John McRae noticed that poppies were growing in a graveyard in Ypres, a place where they’d never taken root before. 

It appeared the bombing runs and rubble of WWI had caused the formerly chalky soil to become rich in lime, allowing the flowers to spread.

When he penned his famous poem about “Flanders Field” where the ‘poppies blow between the crosses row on row’, it further cemented the red marker as a sign of war – and peace.

But it didn’t end there. In 1918, a New York woman named Moina Michael is thought to have started wearing a poppy to commemorate those who died in the all-too many wars.

It was seen by a French visitor two years later, who took the idea back to her home country and began selling the symbol to raise money for poor children.

By 1921, the poppy arrived in Canada and remains the definitive symbol and fundraising campaign for war vets here.