Denise Harris is a retired Air Force officer who served for almost 23 years. She’s now the advisor for Wasatch High School’s Air Force Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, or ROTC, and took over Heber City Cemetery’s Wreaths Across America program in 2024.
The program involves placing wreaths on veteran graves to remember the fallen, honor those who serve and teach the next generation the value of freedom.
Harris, who was once stationed near Washington. D.C., said she first encountered the wreaths program while participating in an event at Arlington National Cemetery.
“Every year, people go to the ceremony to be able to place maybe five or six wreaths on every one of the gravestones at Arlington,” Harris said. “When I found out that Heber had one, and we were asked to participate, I wholeheartedly wanted to support that.”
She said her goal is to have wreaths decorating every veteran's grave at the Heber City Cemetery this December.
So volunteers know where to place wreaths, Harris said she walks the cemetery beforehand to mark graves with small American flags. While doing this, she realized there were more veteran graves than previously thought.
“We still don't have a final headcount of how many veterans are buried in Heber,” she said. “There's a database that the city runs, but the information they get to know there's a veteran there is dependent on the family or the mortuary or the funeral service, so their database isn't 100% accurate.”
While over 370 wreaths were placed last year, Harris estimates there are around 550 veterans at the cemetery. As of Wednesday, over 200 wreaths had been sponsored.
To get to her 550 goal, Harris hopes the community will step up to sponsor the $17 wreaths, which can be reserved for specific veterans.
Harris also invites community volunteers to place the wreaths Dec. 13. The event begins at 10 a.m. with a color guard, national anthem and invocation.
Cadet Liaison Joseph Grayson is a junior at Wasatch who helps organize the event and is in the color guard. He said the event helps keep veteran stories alive.
“In my opinion, no one is truly dead until they're forgotten and by doing this, we're basically keeping these people alive,” he said. “I think it's pretty beautiful that strangers can come together to honor our veterans who fought and died for our country.”
Harris said it’s also an opportunity for locals to learn more about history. When she walked through the cemetery, last year marking graves, she found four brothers who all served in World War II.
“I only had one of them on my list, and then I realized I saw four headstones. They're all veteran headstones,” she said.
Harris later learned that three of the Mair brothers returned to Utah after the war, but the fourth — Dean Mair — was killed in action in March of 1944 while closing in on a Belgian town.
She said she hopes volunteers can have similar experiences to connect with veterans.
“Being able to place even one wreath, you reflect on that person, that gravestone, that veteran, and you spend a few minutes just kind of saying thank you in a moment of silence and for their sacrifice, whether they sacrificed in the line of duty or that's just their sacrifice of their time,” she said.
Locals can sign up to volunteer for the Heber wreath ceremony here.
