Tips for Memorial Service Receptions

Helping you plan a memorial service reception is one of our cremations services. When you’re making funeral arrangements for your deceased loved one, you have a lot of decisions to make. One of those decisions will include planning a reception after the memorial service for your loved one.

While it is typical for other people who are close to you to handle the actual planning and execution of memorial service receptions, here are some tips that you will need to remember as you delegate this task to them.

One tip is to make sure that there is adequate seating around the reception area for people who are elderly or infirmed. Standing for a long time can be very hard on people who are frail or fragile, so make sure there is ample seating so that they can be comfortable and still be part of the memorial service reception.

Serve great food at your loved one’s memorial service reception. Food is a common binding agent that encourages people to stay, to talk, and share memories of your loved one, as well as to provide support, comfort, and encouragement to your family.

The funeral home can arrange for catering for almost any type and style of food that you want served at your loved one’s memorial service reception. From sit-down meals to buffets to dessert, salad, or sandwich bars (depending on the time of day of the memorial service), there are a full range of choices for how the food will be served.

Be sure that there is food for everyone. You may have people at the memorial service reception who are diabetic and who need low-glycemic food choices. You may have people who are gluten-intolerant or who are vegetarians. You may have people who don’t eat certain foods because of their religious beliefs.

While you can’t possibly take every dietary need into account when planning the food for your loved one’s memorial service reception, you can certainly provide a wide enough variety of foods that everyone can eating something that is served.

Plan how you want the memorial service reception to flow. Most memorial service receptions are casual, with people mingling getting food and drinks and talking to the bereaved family and each other as they share memories and stories about the person who died.

You may want to make a special video with your loved one’s pictures and two or three of their favorite songs to be played on a continuous loop during the memorial service reception. These are easy for a tech-savvy person to put together, so enlist the techies in your family to take care of this and make sure that the funeral home or other location where you are planning to hold the reception has the technology to be able to play it.

You may want tables where people can sit and chat or you may want to have seating around the perimeter of the room for those who may need it, leaving the middle of the room open so people can free move around (this encourages more interaction among mourners and your family).

Let the funeral director know your plans are and they will coordinate with the appropriate people to ensure that the memorial service reception for your loved one is perfectly executed.

Memorial service reception planning is among the cremations services we offer, so you can depend on our compassionate and experienced team at Hopler & Eschbach Funeral Home to help you.