Memorial Days in November: An Autumn Page for Grave Care

The three dates follow fixed rules. All Saints’ Day is tied to 1 November (Sec. 7(1) NFeiertagsG). Volkstrauertag is the second and Totensonntag the last Sunday before the first Sunday of Advent (Sec. 6(2) NFeiertagsG). In 2026 the first Sunday of Advent is 29 November, which gives 15 and 22 November. The German War Graves Commission (Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge) also gives 15 November for Volkstrauertag this year (Volksbund). All three memorial days are Sundays in 2026. For a cemetery gardening firm this means the work is done on the days before, and the orders have to come in a little earlier still.

Which of the three days carries the most weight locally depends on the area. All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day that follows are Catholic memorial days on which families in Catholic communities visit the graves. Totensonntag is the memorial day of the Protestant church. On Volkstrauertag, commemorations are held at cemeteries and memorial sites across the country (Volksbund). An autumn page in a predominantly Catholic municipality therefore sets different priorities from one in a Protestant area. Anyone who knows the orders of past years arranges the dates on the page by their local weight.

The Saturdays before Volkstrauertag and before Totensonntag are ordinary working days. Before All Saints’ Day, 2026 is different: since a change in the law in 2018, 31 October has been a state-recognised public holiday in Lower Saxony as Reformation Day (Lower Saxony Ministry of the Interior). Anyone who planned to place arrangements on the Saturday before All Saints’ Day has to bring that work forward to Friday 30 October or earlier. Taking over a work plan from the previous year makes this easy to miss, because Reformation Day moves to a different weekday every year with the calendar.

According to provisional results, just over 1.0 million people died in Germany in 2025 (Federal Statistical Office, Destatis). Behind every grave there are relatives, and by no means all of them live near the cemetery. Migration statistics counted just under one million moves from one German state to another in 2025; 105,363 of them left Lower Saxony (Federal Statistical Office, Destatis). For grave care this means that someone who has their parents’ grave in Peine or Celle looked after often lives in another city and only sees the grave on rare visits. The order is then placed by phone, email and website, not in a conversation at the cemetery gate.

At the same time, what people want for their own burial is changing. In a Forsa survey commissioned by Aeternitas, the German consumer initiative on burial culture, only 25 per cent preferred a classic urn or coffin grave in a cemetery (Aeternitas); in a survey from 2013 the combined figure was still 49 per cent (Aeternitas). In June 2025, 1,002 people aged 18 and over were surveyed (Aeternitas). Aeternitas attributes the change to the needs of a mobile society in which traditional ties and family structures are increasingly dissolving. The graves that exist today do not disappear as a result. But someone who has one of them looked after sometimes lives far away and hands over the care for that reason.

These clients order online if they are allowed to. In 2025, 68 per cent of 45- to 64-year-olds and 50 per cent of 65- to 74-year-olds had bought goods or services online in the three months before the survey (Federal Statistical Office, Destatis). In 2024, 90.8 per cent of private households had a smartphone (Federal Statistical Office, Destatis). The autumn page therefore has to work on a smartphone, for instance when it is opened in the evening after a conversation between siblings in which the question came up of who will look after the grave this year.

The autumn page is not a second list of services. It only shows what is ordered for the memorial days and, for each service, when it can be ordered and what it costs. Everything else, from new grave layouts to headstones, stays on the usual pages and is at most linked from here.

If a price appears on the page and the page is aimed at private clients, it must be given as a total price (Sec. 3(1) PAngV), that is including VAT. That includes the reference unit: per grave, per arrangement, per cover. Grave types and sizes vary a great deal. A range per grave type is therefore more honest than a single price that is too high for an urn grave and too low for a double grave. How such ranges are built is shown in the article Showing prices on your website.

An order that a private individual places exclusively by form, email or phone is usually a distance contract. It carries a right of withdrawal (Sec. 312g(1) BGB), and the withdrawal period is 14 days (Sec. 355(2) BGB). For the autumn page this is not a side issue, because an autumn order is as a rule meant to be carried out within this period: someone who orders on 23 October wants to see the arrangement on the grave on 1 November.

For services, the right of withdrawal only expires on full performance if the consumer expressly agreed before the start that the firm may begin before the withdrawal period ends, and confirmed their awareness that the right of withdrawal expires on full performance of the contract (Sec. 356(5) BGB). This consent therefore belongs in the form as a separate field that is not pre-selected, or as a question in the order confirmation. How an early start works in the business is described in the article Right of withdrawal with consumers.

For arrangements and cut flowers, an exception may apply: there is no right of withdrawal for contracts for the supply of goods that are liable to deteriorate rapidly (Sec. 312g(2) No. 2 BGB). Whether an autumn order that combines an arrangement with placing it at the grave falls under this is a question of the individual case. It belongs in legal advice, not in a sentence on the website.

If clients place a binding paid order directly on the page, the button must be clearly labelled with “zahlungspflichtig bestellen” (order with obligation to pay) or an equally unambiguous wording (Sec. 312j(3) BGB). A simpler route is a form that only triggers an enquiry: the firm then sends an offer by email, and the order is only concluded with the client’s reply. For contracts concluded exclusively by individual communication, the obligations on designing the ordering process do not apply (Sec. 312j(5) BGB). Which route fits depends on how many autumn orders are expected and how much time the office has for confirmations.

The form takes over the role of the conversation at the grave. It asks for what the crew needs and leaves out everything that is not necessary for the order.

One mandatory field fewer is worth more here than a complete record. Relatives often fill in the form in a situation where every follow-up question is one too many. Whatever is not needed for identification, such as dates of birth and death, does not belong in it. How fields can pre-sort without putting people off is set out in the article An enquiry form that qualifies; the structure of such a form is described on the page Enquiry form for landscapers.

After sending, an acknowledgement follows with a sentence on when the firm will be in touch. In the week before a memorial day this period should be short, otherwise the client phones after all and the form has missed its purpose. The page stays calm in tone throughout: no countdown, no discount campaign, no exclamation marks. The order deadline is information, not leverage, and that is how it reads: “For All Saints’ Day we accept orders until Friday 23 October.”