Grave Decorations - Christmas in the Cemetery

For the special season of Christmas, I’m putting aside my usual erudite, logical, and authoritative prose (stop laughing, I can HEAR you) – to examine why people decorate graves at Christmas. As opposed to just asking them, I’m going to just tell you what I think. It’s far less complicated that way.

Of all the holes that may exist in your life, driving through a cemetery at Christmas time can identify a big one. It reminds you of things to come, while making you glad you’re not there yet. That said, a cemetery at Xmas may be the only physical entity that Heisenberg didn’t account for, when he wrote that the simple presence of an observer changes things. Do you really think your presence in a cemetery ever changes it? How about the act of setting up and decorating a full-sized Christmas tree? If anything, it makes the whole thing even more depressing.

A cemetery is a figurative rock (filled with actual rocks) − an impenetrable fortress of stone built by an equally strong belief system. Author Salman Rushdie might refer to a cemetery as an “ironclad citadel of traditions and certainties." Christmas is another tradition, a very strong one for us mackerel-snappers (as an old Jewish guy friend of mine used to call Christians). So why not tie the two together? Surely the florists and garden centers would have us believe that everyone needs a “grave blanket,” or a wreath for the mausoleum door. Give ‘em points for trying, but they haven’t influenced mass behavior anything like the Hallmark card company has. Decorating graves at Christmas seems to have not quite gone public.

I guess the guerilla florists who set up in parking lots target Christians because it’s such a widely-celebrated Christian holiday. Maybe we’re more gullible? Why else would we decorate graves with Santas and reindeer? Hanukkah is a week before Christmas, yet I don’t see the florists hawking sparkling blue menorahs or cute little foam dreidels with which to decorate Jewish children’s graves (in fact, I’ve never even seen a Jewish grave decorated for Hanukkah). Since we haven’t all succumbed to the commercial brainwash, there must be something very personal about placing Christmas decorations on graves. I've even seen poinsettias and wreaths on graves in abandoned cemeteries! Makes you realize that even though a cemetery may be abandoned, not all of its residents may be.

Christmas is of course a Christian holiday, and Christians decorate their homes and malls to make everything feel more cozy − but why cemeteries? To include their departed loved ones in the festivities? Christ-MISS may just bring to mind all the people we miss.

Grave Decorations

"Remember your loved ones this holiday season with a hand-made grave blanket or grave pillow from Dayton's. Commemorate your beloved's grave with sprays of Blue Spruce and Pine along with waterproof ribbons and bows."

Of course there’s also the flip side of sentiment and honoring one’s memory – that of not letting go. In this respect, the loss just keeps on giving. “We’re in a psychologically menacing month when unresolved emotional conflicts, loneliness and other problems influence our behavior.” (ref) Popular wisdom tells us that more people commit suicide at Xmas than any other time of year. While Christmas can be depressing for many people, this is simply not true (Read more here) - but it’s easy to believe. (Studies have shown this to be the only suicide link to the calendar: more of them occur early in the week and fewer on the weekend.) 

"There's got to be a build-up to the day that Christ was born.
The halls are decked with pumpkins and ears of Indian corn.
Dragging through the falling leaves in a one-horse open sleigh.
Suddenly it's Christmas seven weeks before the day.


Suddenly it's Christmas the longest holiday.
When they say 'Season's Greetings' they mean just what they say.
It's a season, it's a marathon retail eternity
And it's not over til it's over and you throw away the tree."


“Suddenly It's Christmas” by Loudon Wainwright III; lyrics © DOWNTOWN MUSIC PUB LLC OBO SNOWDEN MUSIC, INC.(ASCAP)

According to the folk singer Loudon Wainwright III, this is because Christmas is not a single day that’s celebrated, but an entire SEASON. So if you’re expecting to be sad and alone at Christmas, you won't just be sad and lonely on December 25th – you’ll be sad and lonely for two months. Even Valentine’s Day only lasts one day! A girlfriend of many months once broke up with me on Valentine’s Day. The actual day, right after a nice dinner out. Some people have impeccable timing, you know? But even in such a dismal situation, it’s simply the DAY that may remind you of the event a year later. On the contrary, if your Mom died on December 16th, this occurrence during the Christmas “season” is going to stay with you for many more.

"Christmas carols in December and November too.
It's no wonder we're depressed when the whole thing is through.
Finally it's January, let's sing Auld Lang Syne
But here comes another party shaped like a Valentine."

Which is not to say you're psychologically safe if your Dad died in August, as mine did. Christmas is traditionally when the family gets together. So when you're all sitting down for Christmas dinner five years hence, everyone still feels the empty space left by the missing person. Christmas brings the memory back. Which in some ways, is a good thing, of course. But do you REALLY want to go mucking about with all those Christmas decorations in the cemetery? Maybe it would be best to just drop the spray of pine boughs on your loved one’s grave and go back to life among the living.

And Furthermore .....

How to Decorate a Grave Site

Listen to Loudon Wainwright's "Suddenly It's Christmas."

Halloween Horror

What reminded me of this incident was the fact that my homeowners’ insurance company suggested I have a “mold remediation” service look at my kitchen ceiling. I had a roof leak during the hurricane that hit Philadelphia in August, 2011. Water came in, the ceiling got wet, and some mold formed. The ceiling needs to be repaired, and any mold remediated.  The “mold remediation” service that was suggested by my insurance company is called “SERVPRO.” SERVPRO figures prominently in this very real horror story.

As I waited outside my house a few weeks ago for the familiar light green truck to pull up, I started thinking back to that fateful day in 1997. I was a bit surprised when two men got out of an unmarked car and approached me with meters and clipboards. In retrospect, the company may only send out a green vehicle to do an actual job. Why make the neighbors’ curious with a SERVPRO truck in the neighborhood? Now, if you’re anything like I was in 1997, a SERVPRO truck wouldn’t even raise an eyebrow. But in the last ten years, I’ve noticed many more of their trucks around, which can only mean that business is booming. What business might that be, you wonder? Let’s just call it ‘biohazard waste clean-up,’ for now. So every time you see a SERVPRO truck waiting in traffic or parked in front of some house, you can guess what they’re up to.

Back in 1997, I had a previous life. Married to the first wife, we owned a duplex in the suburbs. Had three lovely children. Rented the upstairs half of the house. One hot summer day, I was washing the car in the driveway. Everyone was inside their air-conditioned homes, including two of my kids in my house. What with the noise of the hose and the neighborhood AC units humming along, no one heard the gunshot. 

An ambulance pulled in front of my driveway, a bunch of EMTs jumped out and started running toward me up the driveway. Before they got to my car, they turned and ran up the exterior staircase leading up to our second-floor apartment. The story goes that Gary and Gail, boyfriend and girlfriend – our tenants − were lying in bed. Gail was “fooling around” with Gary’s handgun. She supposedly put the barrel in her mouth and said to him, “You don’t think I’d do it?” 

She wasn’t dead when they took her away in the ambulance, but died shortly thereafter. The police questioned Gary, and then left. He came down to tell me his version of what happened and told me he was too shaken up to stay in the apartment. He said he’d be staying with his mother for a while. We didn’t see him for several weeks. Thought it was kind of odd that the police didn’t suspect him of any wrongdoing, but hey, they’re the pros. They must have been satisfied with his story.

Other than the death scene itself, one of the most horrifying things is that the guy had a gun. And he and is girlfriend were in my house playing games with it. What if the bullet had gone through the floor into the living space where my children were? What if it went through a window into a neighbor’s house? For years I concerned myself with enforcing the ”no pets “ clause in the lease – never occurred to me that tenants would have guns!

After everyone left, I went upstairs. Blood and brains splattered on the wall, a blood-soaked mattress. Blood on the wall-to-wall carpeting. It all smelled like blood. NOW what? They never show you THIS part on the cop shows on television. Who cleans this up? I spent the better part of a day on the phone calling all the likely resources – police, fire department, ambulance companies, funeral homes. By their responses, you’d swear nothing like this had EVER HAPPENED BEFORE! NO ONE had a clue what to tell me! Having worked in a hospital, they train you to take precautions when handling any bodily fluid spills, since all sorts of diseases can be living in it. So I knew I couldn’t touch anything without the proper tools. Plus it was gross. I called a friend of mine who used to be a firefighter. He suggested calling SERVPRO, a company I’d never heard of.

SERVPRO is who you call when you have “hazardous waste” to clean up. Crime scenes, accidents, anything involving blood and human tissues.  It’s a national chain. I’m sure other private companies exist, but good luck finding them! 

Ever see the movie “Sunshine Cleaning?” It came out in 2008, and it’s about cleaning up after messy deaths. This is something most people don’t ever have to think about. It’s also something they never address in cop shows on TV or in the movies, at least until “Sunshine Cleaning”  came out. The movie is about two young women with dead-end jobs who start “a biohazard removal/crime scene clean-up service.” It’s a dark comedy, both funny and revolting at the same time. They clean up all sorts of messy death scenes − gun shots victims, gruesome bodies that had been putrefying for months, and on and on. I was mesmerized by the movie, especially at how the women figured out how to do the job, since I had been through the learning process of clean-up myself. But the movie came out years after my own incident - I would’ve given ANYTHING for such information at the time of the gunshot death in my house.

I was certainly appreciative when the SERVPRO guys came the next day in their white Tyvek zipper suits and space helmets. They bagged up the mattress and tore out the rug. I watched them carry it all down the outside stairs, wondering where they would take it all. They cleaned the walls and disinfected the hardwood floor under the rug (blood had seeped through the rug). They did a great job - as they say in their advertisements, like it never happened. Well, sort of. It was also surprisingly affordable. I remember thinking, “They could have charged me TEN TIMES this amount and I would’ve had to pay it.” 

Gary came back a few weeks later and announced that he would be moving in with his mother. Okay with me. Was wondering how I was going to get him out of there. After he left, I had to go through the process of finding a new tenant. As people came to look at the place, I hoped none of the neighbors would pull them aside and whisper, “Hey, you know somebody died up there?” Killing all my chances of ever renting the place again. But that didn’t happen. Got new people and they never found out, to my knowledge. Time passes. 

Fast forward two years later, when I spot an item in the local paper, showing a photo of Gary! The police had arrested him for murder. Did somebody have second thoughts about the shooting at my house? Did they nail him for killing his girlfriend? Well, no. It seems that at some point, Gary moved in with a couple the next town over, then shot and killed them both. To my knowledge, they never re-opened the case of his “suicide” girlfriend.


Last Words:

"Gary" and "Gail" are not their real names. 
 Link to SERVPRO, in the event, God forbid, you ever need them.
View trailer of the movie,  “Sunshine Cleaning”