In the UK, there are certain rules about what can be done with the body of a deceased person once they pass on and these apply in Greater Manchester just as much as they would in the rest of the country. The basic idea is to ensure that no potential infections are caused by disposing of the body in an inadequate way. Unless you seek a special license, for example, you cannot make your own funeral pyre. Instead, you’ll need to book a proper crematorium. As such, there are only two types of traditional funeral services in the UK today – burials and cremations.
To be clear, there is no one set of rules about what makes a traditional funeral service a traditional one. According to Newrest Funerals, a funeral planning service provider that operates throughout the North of England, people’s traditional funerals vary greatly these days. Some have religious readings, hymns and prayers while others are secular and include pop music. There again, traditional Jewish funerals are often very different from traditional Hindu services. The same goes for Sikh, Islamic or Buddhist funeral rites.
In short, people include certain traditional elements when they arrange the funeral of a loved one but don’t necessarily feel the need to incorporate them all. For instance, for some, a traditional funeral cortège will necessarily involve a horse-drawn hearse while, for others, there will be no need to send flowers but a request to make a donation to charity instead.
So, given that the term traditional funeral can mean so many different things to different people, you might well ask what is it that makes a service traditional in any sense? Today, the answer is more related to what a traditional funeral service is not. In this sense, traditional burials and cremations will cover any sort of service which brings people together to mourn and to celebrate the loss of a loved one in a traditional setting, whether that’s a place of worship, a council-run crematorium or a cemetery.
This means, for example, that even well-established services such as burials at sea are not considered to be traditional. Although such burials are a naval tradition, anyone can book a burial at sea nowadays if they want. Equally, it is possible to plan an ecological funeral for yourself or a loved one these days. So-called eco-funeral services will often be conducted on private land and involve placing the body into the ground in a cardboard coffin or even a pod which is designed to break down rapidly.
There again, some people like the idea of being placed into a mushroom suit when they pass on, a process which will mean any toxins present in the body are dealt with by fungi so they won’t pollute the local environment. Equally, some crematoria offer water-based cremations nowadays since these operate at lower temperatures than traditional cremators, thereby lowering the carbon footprint of the funeral. All such funerals might involve traditional elements, such as eulogies, but they are not considered to be traditional within the funeral industry. Only burials and conventional cremations fall into that category.
