Word: customs
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Despite this supreme precedent of night burials, I doubt if the custom would ever become popular in the U. S. Of course, it has its advantages: a convenient hour when friends can come without missing their work, a dark privacy for personal grief, a hushed solemnity. But are not pomp and ostentation an integral part of most funerals and is not daylight necessary to parade their magnificence? The Negroes of the South who take long days from their field and house work to commit their dead amid lugubrious festivities are not radically different from their white masters in this respect...
...pansies--for only 35 cents". Other national days and weeks are usually perfectly innocuous or mildly amusing. Mothers' Day, obviously invented merely to capitalize the feelings of a sentimental populace, is manifestly distasteful to those who have respect, as well as love, for their mothers. The annual custom of Mothers' Day is one the date and very existence of which are annually forgotten by the public until resurrected by storedealers in early May. Complete oblivion would be more desirable...
...night before Easter. The mortician in charge, Leo A. Hoffman, did not like the idea of a funeral on Easter, thought it might bring the mourners sad recollections on future Easters. Efficient, enterprising, Mortician Hoffman had an idea. Funeral services are often held at night. Wakes are an old custom. Why not?though he had never heard of one?a night burial...
...Miami, Fla., Chief Tommy Tommy, Seminole Indian educated in white schools, member of the Methodist Episcopal Church South, contact man between whites and Indians, died. He was buried by a Methodist minister. His relatives tossed live embers and three matches into his grave: an old Seminole custom, to light his way to the Happy Hunting Ground...
...custom which has grown of late is that of applauding an instructor at the conclusion of a stimulating lecture. Applause, it should be noted well, comes not at the end of each class, but only those in which the student audience conceives the lecture to have been unusually entertaining. Though doubtlessly done with the best of intentions, this habit is apt to assume alarming regularity with subsequent disastrous consequences...