All Saints' Day

Post Reply New Topic

Who is going to pay a visit to their family graves on All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day?

I love both of those days. I would go to visit the graves of my departed loved-ones if I could, but it's doubtful that I will.

Recently, someone stole a bunch of flowers from my uncle's grave - his daughter saw them later on, laying on another grave and she was 100% sure these flowers were those which were stolen because the bunch was very characteristic.

If I were her, I'd take them, leaving a note explaining the person who stole the bunch was one f*****g thief.

That's about as low as you can go. To steal flowers from someone's grave and put them on another grave. Some people are morally bankrupt.

Luckily, nobody has (so far) stolen a very expensive bunch from my grandparents' grave.

In my country those days are considered the best occassion to wear the smartest clothes and show off while visiting the graves.

That's very interesting. What kind of grave stones do you have in your cemetery? Are they big and elaborate, or modest? Just a simple carved ground marker with name, date of birth. date of death and a brief saying like "In Loving Memory" costs about $1,500.00 here, which includes the work of putting it in the ground. The larger more elaborate grave stones can get very expensive.

Our back yard borders a cemetery. The section of the cemetery that borders our house is like a Potter's field and the stones are very modest, simple ground markers. Also many War Veterans are buried there and the government pays for their markers which are bronze and identify the veterans by their name and military rank and the war they fought in. We have many Viet Nam veterans buried there, almost in our back yard and when the war was still going on there was a military funeral about twice a week. Very sad. We use to watch from the roof of one of our out buildings.

After that section is another larger section across a creek. Larger, more expensive stones are there and the graves are better kept by the grounds people.

My family members are not buried in our locality but in two different villages, a dozen or so kilometers away from our town. The name of one of them is translated as High Mountains but even careful search isn’t going to show you any mountains being located in there, lol. The cemetery in there is much older and during my previous visits to that place, I saw some old vaults were partially ruined, with fissures through which you could look in to see the coffin. Many graves in there were destroyed by bombs during the Second World War, hence although my grandmother had at least 8 siblings (she didn’t know their exact number either), there’s only one grave of her sister that still exists. She died of tuberculosis as a girl of 16 and she’s buried in one grave with my aunt’s newborn baby who died about 25 years after her. The grave stones are usually big in here, family vaults are popular, only poorer people who can’t afford anything better, confine themselves to just burying their family members in the ground.

We have 5 cemeteries in our town, one of them is an old Russian cemetery for soldiers from the First World War. The oldest one is from 1792.

Today we went to visit the graves of some people we knew - my mother's two workmates, our distant relative and some elderly man who was a friend of my cousin's family. We brought candles to them - one of them was put on the grave of some young doctor who was 26 when he died in 1832 - because he was my peer and because his grave was the oldest I found in there.

My mom at one moment having read the name of some man buried in one grave said: "I used to know this man". To which I replied: "then it was probably in your previous life; this guy died in 1948" (she was born in 1954).

In the end of WW2 the Russian destroyed the old German cemeteries, so we don't have graves from 18th and 19th centuries and not so many graves to visit, but I was at cemetery and I visited these ones who died in 20th century.

I was looking for blue candles (very rare this year). Today is Binary Day, so I thought that white candles were 0 and red were 1 and I calculated the binary numbers on some graves.

I'd like to go, but both my grandfather and my great grandmother are buried in Mexico.

All my family's graves are a very long way from me. Besides, I don't see the point of visiting graves, because the people aren't there. The only exception I make is to visit my husband's grave when I'm at my Mother in Law's... because it matters to her, not because it matters to me. He's in heaven, I don't have to worry about him anymore.

I usually visit family graves around this time, sprucing them up for Christmas, when they'll get fresh flowers. It does not appear customary around here to visit for All Souls Day, except for very traditional Catholics. My older Protestant relatives do their visiting on Memorial Day, whether the family members were in the military or not. Me, I just like old customs, whether or not I'm really entitled to them.

I'm so far away from my family and i havent know about any deaths. but me and the would like to go and visit that Icon of our lady of guadaloupe thats said to be a Miricle from god or something in mexico