Why Are So Many People Wearing Red Today? R.E.D. Friday, Explained

Red is everywhere online today: red shirts, red tees, group photos under the hashtag #RedFriday. It is not a holiday sale or a team color. It is R.E.D. Friday, a weekly habit of wearing red for American service members deployed overseas and the families counting days at home.

What the letters mean

R.E.D. stands for Remember Everyone Deployed. The ritual is simple on purpose: wear something red on a Friday and let it tell the people far from home they have not been forgotten. It is not a federal holiday. No government agency runs it, and there is no office to join. Military families, veterans groups, schools, and workplaces keep it going.

A teddy bear that carries the fallen

In New Hampshire, the Portsmouth Herald runs a weekly veterans series on Fridays because of the R.E.D. Friday movement, the paper says. Today's story is Kim Hebert of Methuen, Massachusetts, founder of the Honor Bear Project in 2016. Hebert carries a teddy bear that now weighs about 20 pounds, covered in pins, dog tags, and a small camouflage uniform. Each item stands for a fallen service member whose story she learned from the family left behind. The Connecticut Veterans Bulletin marked the day, for the service members standing watch far from home.

Two origin stories, and a name that came later

Nobody owns the start of this tradition. One thread begins with a chain email in 2005, urging Americans to wear red on Fridays and pass it on. A second thread runs through Canada, where military spouses Lisa Miller and Karen Boier organized Red Friday events in 2006 for Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan. That September, Prime Minister Stephen Harper joined a rally of thousands in red. The letters arrived a decade later. In April 2015, students at Mansfield University in Pennsylvania, led by Army veteran Cecil Cooper, launched a campus campaign under the R.E.D. name. Hundreds on campus spelled RED in human letters on the football field, the university says.

Why it lands harder this fall

Deployments are long right now, and military towns feel it. On October 8, the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln came home to San Diego after more than ten months at sea. Roughly 5,000 sailors poured off the ship to waiting families, some meeting babies born while they were away. Thousands of other Americans are still deployed tonight. The red is for them, and for the spouses, children, and parents doing the waiting.

One more date to know: October 26

A related observance arrives on Monday, October 26: the Day of the Deployed. It began in 2006, when Soldiers' Angels volunteer Shelle Michaels Aberle asked North Dakota Governor John Hoeven to proclaim a day for deployed troops. She chose October 26 because it was the birthday of her cousin, Army Lt. Col. David Hosna, then serving in Iraq. Other states followed, and in 2011 the U.S. Senate backed a national Day of the Deployed.

How to take part

Wear red. That is all it takes. Post the photo if you want, or keep it quiet. The people who keep this tradition say the shirt is only the signal. It lands when someone far from home, or someone waiting for them, learns they were remembered.