What Year Did Decoration Day Become Memorial Day. He kept his promise and issued general orders no. What should you not do on memorial day?
Congress further left its mark when the holiday was no longer referred to as decoration day. The most recent official acts came in 1968 and in 1971 when congress declared memorial day a national holiday to be observed on the last monday in may. How it came to be decoration day officially began three years after the end of the civil war in 1868.