My observation 3

The day before yesterday, while visiting different cemeteries in celebration of All Saints' Day, I noticed a few things wrong with our national iteration of this holiday, or rather the way people celebrate it. First of all, most people treat visiting graves of relatives as an unpleasant chore. Instead of actually reflecting on the cherished memories they have of their late family members, or trying to understand the complex ties which make them related to the people they are visiting, they choose the "quantity over quality route". They visit the tomb of every person they might be even remotely related to, lighting a candle and swiftly moving to the next one. I find this practice particularly upsetting as in my view it defeats the whole purpose of the entire holiday. 

Secondly, the holiday seems to create an outrageous amount of waste. Tonnes of lights, flowers, etc. are blindly thrown away into the trash every year. Even if there was an initiative to sort all this rubbish, the damage and material variety (eg. artificial flowers are made of multiple inseparable, synthetic materials, glass lights have cross symbols and imagery of Jesus glued to them) would still make it impossible to recycle. The meaning of the lights and flowers is only symbolic so we should minimise their use instead of putting dozens of lavish decorations on a single tomb. Additionally, we could manufacture the decorations in more sustainable ways also making them more durable, so we could use them (with wax refills in the case of lights) for extended periods of time.