Advice, guides & articles

Christmas is around the corner again and whilst a period of celebration for many, it can also be a reminder of those we have lost over the years. This week sees Funeral Notices launch their Christmas Memorial Wall for 2023. The virtual tribute page is designed to allow people to share photographs, memories, light virtual candles and pay tribute to their loved ones, whose loss is particularly poignant during the festive season.

Mourning is a deeply ingrained human response to loss, and the customs and practices associated with it have evolved significantly over time. Mourning in the Victorian era was strict, with certain rules and rituals that had to be followed, whereas in modern time mourning tends to be much more relaxed and flexible. Today, we’ll have a look at the key differences between mourning in Victorian times and mourning in contemporary society.

November always starts with a bang in the UK, quite literally as we have just seen on 5th November with Bonfire night, then it tends to hit a bit of a lull as the rest of the month is spent prepping for Christmas, but we’re here to tell you that it doesn’t have to. Here are just a few of the things you could get up to in November!

The arrival of autumn brings significant changes to the world around us, maybe more than any other season. The air grows cooler, the days are shorter, trees change colour and begin to lose their leaves, and the air becomes thick with anticipation for the upcoming festive season. Perhaps this is why autumn evokes such strong feelings and emotions in some people; on one side of the scale, there are people who look forward to the coming of autumn, to cosy jumpers and scented candles, whereas on the other side there are those who dread the looming dark nights and gloomy mornings that autumn inevitably brings. In this blog post we’ll explore the reasons why autumn has such an effect on our moods.

The Halloween we know today is very different from the ancient celtic festival it evolved from. The focus now is on trick-or-treating and dressing up in costumes, but the Halloween traditions we participate in today have evolved from ancient traditions involving the dead. People believed that the line between the living and the dead was blurred on Halloween, meaning spirits could find their way into our world. Not every culture celebrates Halloween, but many cultures have their own traditions surrounding the dead which share similarities with Halloween. In this blog post, we’ll take a look at some of these traditions.

We’ve covered a few different genres on the funeral-notices.co.uk blog, but dance and electronic music is one that is not in my personal wheelhouse, so it proved to be an interesting one to research. What really struck me is the emotion that people draw from these songs that have little to no actual words in them. Take a look in the comments section on YouTube for some of the songs below, and you’ll see just how much these songs mean to people. The answer to whether or not you can have dance or electronic music played at your funeral is of course yes, you can! Funerals should reflect the person that they are memorialising, and one great way of doing that is through the music that is played.

As I start writing this article, I genuinely have no idea what Histiocytosis is. It came to my attention through the notice for Olivia Courtenay Spencer, the friends and family of whom raised over £1,000 for Histio UK, a charity I was not at all familiar with. So I thought we could learn together as I write this, as it was clearly an important cause to Olivia and her family, and I want to know more about it.

Many people associate the season of spring with cleaning and decluttering, but as the leaves start to change colour and fall to the ground, it reminds us of the beauty of letting go, making autumn the perfect season to clean up our physical spaces and also declutter our minds. Just as we clear out the old and make way for the new in our homes, we can do the same for our thoughts and emotions.

Artificial Intelligence, or A.I., has been in the media a lot recently. It’s a technology that has been around for a while, but has become more widely available thanks to websites like Chat GPT and Google Bard. But what can you really do with these publicly accessible A.I. programs? In its simplest form, you can get A.I. to write an essay for you, suggest good titles for your blogs, or even write a Funeral Notice for you. Now, we like to think we know Funeral Notices pretty well, so we decided to test Chat GPT and see if they could write a good Funeral Notice. I started off by asking: Can you write a funeral notice for a family member who has died The response said that it could, but first it needed some details like name, date of birth, date of death, and any other details I’d like to include. I entered the following made up details: Name: John Smith, Date of Birth: 17/05/1964, Date of Death: 19/09/2023, Wife: Jane, Children: Jack and Jenny I think I expected it to come back with something quite simple and straightforward, but it actually produced something a lot longer and more detailed than I ever imagined. It included all the details I had given it, along with extra aspects I would hope for, such as a place to include the time and date of the funeral, and whether flowers or donations were being asked for, but then it also included some extra detail that I wasn’t expecting. John's passion for life was evident to all who knew him. Whether he was tending to his garden, cheering on his favourite sports teams, or sharing stories with friends and family, he brought joy to every moment. He had an infectious laughter that could light up any room, and his warm smile could comfort anyone in need. Tending to his garden and cheering on his favourite sports teams? Laughter that could light up any room? They seem like very specific details to include when I never mentioned them, but I guess they could be used as prompts that you can delete and change as applicable. Personal details definitely do make a Funeral Notice stand out and be more meaningful, so it’s not a bad suggestion at all. I decided to try another approach, so I started again and this time I asked: Can you give me a template for a funeral notice And that’s just what it did! I’ll add the whole response below so that you can see what it gave me, but I have to say that I was impressed, and I think A.I. could be a great tool for people who are struggling to know what to say.

As the leaves change colour and the air turns crisp, the arrival of autumn brings with it the perfect opportunity to engage in some much needed self-care. While many of us eagerly anticipate pumpkin-spiced lattes and cosy scarves, the transition to autumn can be a challenging time for some. The shorter, darker nights can bring about feelings of melancholy, and the shift in seasons may exacerbate the struggle that some individuals experience with their mental well-being. Here are ten ways you can embrace autumn self-care to help boost your mental health and make the most of this enchanting season: Spend time in nature Autumn is a beautiful season; trees are stunning in hues of red, orange and yellow, their leaves crunching underfoot, and the air starts to turn crisp. Go for a leisurely hike, a peaceful walk through the woods, or simply find a park where you can sit and enjoy the beauty of the changing leaves. Spending time outside can work wonders for your mental well-being.