Guide: How to Decorate a Headstone or Memorial

If you choose to lay your loved one to rest in a cemetery, their headstone and burial spot will serve as a special place that you can visit as often as you’d like. When visiting, family members and friends of the deceased often find comfort in bringing something with them to decorate their loved one’s headstone.

Personalized grave decorations not only beautify the headstone and breathe life into the burial spot, but they may also help you feel more connected to your loved one even after they’re gone. In a way, by maintaining or decorating their headstone, you are continuing to show your love and care even though they are no longer with you. 

In this guide, we will walk you through several different ways you can decorate a headstone or memorial:

Graveside Flowers

There are a number of ways you can decorate a headstone, but the most common decorations are graveside flowers. Many headstones actually incorporate a vase into their designs, making it even simpler to add this decoration to a loved one’s stone. The built-in vase offers the perfect place for your flowers or plants to stand tall and display proudly.

If the headstone that you design does not have a built-in vase, don’t worry. It’s customary to lay flowers directly on top of a headstone, or directly on the ground in front of the headstone.

Personal Items

Tombstone decorations don’t need to stop with flowers. For veterans and military members, it’s common to see small flags that represent the country in which the deceased served. You can even bring personal items that you know your loved one cherished in their day-to-day lives. If they had a favorite book for example, you could leave a copy with a note inscribed in the front cover. Or maybe, your family member was a huge sports fan; you could leave a baseball card of their favorite player, or an old football by their headstone to decorate their resting spot with the things they loved most in life.

Our main piece of advice is to make sure you check with the cemetery as to what’s allowed. Some cemeteries will have stricter guidelines for what they allow you to leave on or near your loved one’s headstone. 

Holiday Decorations

It’s also common to decorate headstones during the holidays. In the Winter, cemetery Christmas decorations are very popular. You could buy a wreath with a big red bow to bring some of the holiday spirit to your loved one’s headstone. Poinsettias are another very popular holiday plant that make for beautiful headstone decorations. For Valentine’s day, you might see bouquets of roses as the decoration of choice. Your loved one may not be there in person to celebrate the holidays with you, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t bring the holidays to them.

We hope our guide has given you some ideas for how you can continue to show your love for the deceased by routinely decorating their headstone. For more advice on the burial process and what to know about finding a cemetery for your loved one, please be sure to read: “How to Choose a Cemetery”