Social Graces Custom & Etiquette

Shelly, Inger, and all. Well, I think this is about the strangest way I have spent a Friday Night! Hair jewelry, tear catchers, and cre-main jewelry? This, by far is one place where customs have drastically changed, but how interesting to see how our own grandparents would have done things.
Sincerely:
Colleen
 
>>Yes- today's drive-through funerals (I am NOT kidding), short dresses and vulgar displays of bad flowers are an abomination-have we become de-sensitized? <<

So it would seem. I saw people show up for funerals in bluejeans, those loose shorts you expect to see on the beach, and I remember one where some bloke went around taking all kinds of photos and another where the family didn't even show up for one poor man. His friends took care of everything. Compared to these scenes, that "merry widow" I mentioned looked downright tactful!

Ain't no respect these days.
sad.gif


Cordially,
Michael H. Standart
 
Hello,but what about the wonderful, unexplored area of funeral superstitions? The majority of the following come from early/mid Victorian times here in Britain.

The coffin should always leave through the front door of the house, or via a front window if that is the only alternative to using a back door. If a back dooe is used, the deceased will be in jeopardy in the after life!

If the deceased was a virgin, this was marked by the mourners dressing in white and a pair of white gloves being carried at the head of the funeral procession, if she was a particularily virtuous woman, a white garland would also be carried which would be hung up in the church for many months until it finally fell apart and was buried near to the deceased.

Old English custom suggests that mourners wear black in order to confuse the Devil but to cease wearing it following the funeral and change mourning wear to brown or navy blue to avoid further attention from "Himself"!

Irish tradition (of course!) goes one better. Should an Irishman met a funeral procession he must throw a stone after the coffin and invoke the name of the Trinity, if he also thinks on to call the deceased's name out loud, he may have the added bonus of getting rid of any warts by wishing them onto the corpse!

Here in the North of England the dead person was usually buried with their bible (we are very pious round here!) hymn book and Sunday School ticket!

A new cemetery often had a dead animal interred before any humans could be admitted. The reason being that nobody would be willing to have their dear departed received as the first burial as it was believed that the Devil (yes, HIM again!) always claimed the soul of the first corpse as his own.

Eastern Britain frowns upon the first internee of a grave being a woman for "If a grave is opened for a she, it will open up for three" suggesting that two male relatives will soon be joining her!

Weirdest of them all perhaps is the British "symbolic burial" which involves the faked burial of a living person, usually a sick child in the belief that this will fool the evil spirits causing the malady and promote the patient's recovery. "Dipping" which is the process of of lowering and raising someone from an opened grave is said to promote recovery from whooping cough, fever and rheumatism.


Geoff
 
Hi, Geoff!

>if he also thinks on to call the deceased's name
> out loud, he may have the added >bonus of getting rid of any warts by wishing them >onto the corpse!

"Geoff Whitfield!" (Hey -- it worked! They're gone!) :-)

All my best,

George
 
Geoff -what a delicious collection of superstitions- am afraid that purveyors of white garments for virginal mourners might go bust in a hurry nowadays! Can't top your list-a Southern tradition is always to hold a BUTTON when a hearse passes- why? I have NO idea! Granny said to-...also hold your breath while passing a cemetery entrance lest your breath be snatched by those within! Have recently seen a bell alarm system for protection from being buried alive. A string is attached to the corpse's finger, passes through a pipe in the coffin top and then on upward above the ground and is attached to a small bell. Theoretically-one could ring for help- the expression "Saved by the bell" originated here! With my luck I would awaken in the middle of the night or the caretaker would be at the pub!
http://www.theweboftime.com/Issue-4/mournart.htm
check out the anti-grave-robbing gun!
 
To this day, in most of the Southern US, when traveling by car, if one meets a funeral procession coming in the oncoming lane, one pulls off to the side of the road and waits until the entire procession has passed.
 
Mention of Highgate the other week and a rather gray and ominous Sunday this past weekend prompted me to go and try and catch some of the last of the Autumn colours in the rather lovely, melancholy and picturesque Victorian cemetary. While I was at it I signed up as a volunteer with 'Friends of Highgate', citing an interest in Victorian funerary sculpture as a motivation.

It was every bit as eerily beautiful as I recalled - a few last blazes of orange and red in some of the leaves, a preturnatural stillness under an overcast sky. Took some photos, so if anyone else out there wants to see the 'Circle of Lebanon' or decaying angels struggling free of ever-encroaching undergrowth drop me a line and I'll email the scans.

~ Inger
 
And back to Highgate...I rather thought this was a place in London I was always destined to have more to do with. Touch wood (many a slip twixt the cup and the lip, but for those of you who were there for the Friday night TML chat and the litany of disaster re. new flat, the relocation is back on track), I'll be relocating to a neighbourhood right alongside the old cemetery. Plus side is being closer to my favourite London pub, haunt of my father in the 50s, the Spaniard's Inn on Hampstead Heath. Only loss to moving out of the East End is leaving the street where, so Eric informed me, one of the Lusitania's crew lived and where Moody studied for his Master's certificate just down the road.

The fact that Colindale and the Brit Newspaper Library is just a hop skip and a jump away from the new address had, of course, no bearing on decision making processes...
 
>>I remember one where some bloke went around taking all kinds of photos<<

While snapping photographs at a funeral may seem odd to those of us living in the early 21st century, having a photograph taken of a loved one after they had passed was not uncommon a century ago. What might seem even more bizarre to some is the fact that the deseased was often posed in "life-like" positions, or to appear as though they were merely sleeping. And parents would occassionally pose with thier dead child, while having still living children sit for the photo as well.
 
>>Babies were buried and photographed in long christening gown style clothing<<

On a non-funeral related side note, during the Victorian Era, this was common dress for infants, not just for burial purposes. Babies who were not yet toddling were often dressed in long gowns, what we typically today think of as a style for christening gowns. This style kept little legs warm in drafty houses if covers were kicked off, and the longer they were, the less likely to ride up and expose bare skin. And allowed for easy access for changing of "napkins" (aka: diapers). As the child reached an age where pulling up and walking were expected they were then switched to shorter dresses, for boys and girls alike, until no longer in diapers, at which point boys were switched to short pants. I have a lovely picture of my grandfather, probably taken in 1914 or '15, looking very girly by todays standards in his dress and curls. ; )
 
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