It's Flag Day! Here's how to display your flag

It's Flag Day! So I thought I'd put out a few reminders on how to display your flag correctly.

First, Flag Day. Why do have it? We celebrate Flag Day on June 14. It marks the adoption of the American flag by the Continental Congress in the First Flag Act passed on June 14, 1777.

In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson issued a proclamation officially establishing June 14 as Flag Day. Even so, Flag Day was never formally established as a federal holiday so everything will be open and you'll still get the mail.

If you're putting a flag up, here's a couple of things to remember:
1. Traditional guidelines call for displaying the flag in public only from sunrise to sunset. Sunset right now is around 8:30 pm.

2. You can keep it up after sunset, but you need to have a light on it. My floodlight on my flag is on a dusk to dawn timer, and I use an LED spotlight to save money over a traditional light bulb.

3. According to the Veteran's Administration, it should not be displayed during rain, snow and wind storms, unless it is an all-weather flag. If a storm is coming, I try to take mine down, so it doesn't get ripped off my house.

4. It should be raised briskly and lowered ceremoniously.

And, of course, Flag Day is just a precursor to Independence Day, so you should be all squared away when July 4th rolls around in a couple of weeks!

BTW, if you have a flag that you can't lower to half-staff (hopefully we don't need to for a while), you can always check out what to do on my Facebook post from a while back: