The Best Sympathy Gifts
Everyone whats to know what are the best sympathy gifts to send to a grieving family. We have been in the sympathy gift business for over 45 years and while the basics have stayed the same, some new items are becoming more and more popular. How to send your condolences to a grieving family? Let us help you find the best sympathy gift.
Fresh Cut Flowers
Fresh Cut Flowers always have and will always be the most popular sympathy gift. The week of a family member’s passing, the funeral home will most likely have a viewing and family and friends will send flowers to the viewing. Over the years, the style has changed a little bit moving away from only traditional one sided arrangements, to incorporating more items into the floral pieces like lanterns, angels, and memorial candles. Family, friends, and businesses usually order flowers for the day of the visitation to arrive at the funeral home or church and all of that information is usually on the funeral home’s website. If you don’t know what sympathy flowers to send, let the florist handle that for you.
We recommend doing a google search for local florists in the area of the funeral home. There are a lot of Call Center Florists that will take your order, then wire it to a local florist for you. For Example : FTD, Floranext, Ava’s Flowers, Terry’s Flowers, 1-800 Flowers, Bloomnet, and probably a few others. If you are on a time crunch and you are comfortable with using those services, just remember you are often paying an extra $10-15 in service fees just to the person on the phone and they are in the business of taking phone calls and not actually designing the flowers themselves. They have mastered the art of Search Engine Optimization and they make it look like they are local florists but in reality you are not talking to someone right in that small town, only just an order taker. We HIGHLY recommend just calling the local florist directly so you know what seasonal flowers they have in stock, are the lilies open, what other items to incorporate into the arrangement. Calling your local florist or going to their website is always an option to wire out flowers as well. We have always had a $5 wire out fee on our website compared to the $10-15 charge from larger companies https://mccabesgreenhouseandfloral.com. Again, we highly recommend just googling local florist in their hometown, and calling them directly to get exactly what you want.
A lot of times, funeral announcements are missed or people are on vacation and aren’t able to send a floral arrangement to the funeral. Grieving doesn’t end at the funeral, it is still a wonderful gesture to send flowers days and weeks later to just let them know you are still thinking about them. First holidays, birthdays, and other special occasions are still very difficult on people, consider sending flowers on those difficult days also. While fresh cut flowers might be the best sympathy gift, lets explore some others.
Dish Gardens & Floor Plants
Following fresh cut flowers, the second best sympathy gift, or at least the most common second place gift, would be a houseplant or dishgarden. Customers want the family to have something that will last a long time verses a 1-3 week floral arrangement. Peace lily (Spathiphyllum) is the most common single house plant requested for a funeral but many florists/greenhouse have lots of other options like boston ferns, maiden hair ferns, crotons, fig trees, ficus trees and many others. Most florists will carry something called a dish garden and they will be a combination of smaller indoor house plants. With a dish garden, you can usually add an angel or a lantern right into the planter. Another common thing is to add some more resilient flowers like carnations or daisies to a dish garden so it looks nice at the funeral home or church, then removed from the plant once they have finished blooming. So many of our customers will come in saying they still have a plant 20-30 years later from their mother’s funeral. At our Garden center, my best guess is that we do about 60% Fresh cut flowers, 20 % Live Plants and 20% Gift items. Still looking for a different sympathy gift, we have lots of ideas that aren’t flowers and plants.
Lanterns, Angels, Afghans, Benches, Candles & Wind Chimes
Lanterns , Angels, Afghans, Benches, Candles and Wind Chimes all kind of fall into the next category as they are often carried by lots of florists and can be hand delivered to a funeral home to be displayed for the visitation. We engrave lots of wind chimes and candles in our store. Please inquire at info@littleflockdesignco.com if you see an item in the pictures but do not see them in our online store yet. These gift items are very popular things to send to a funeral when you have a specific person you want to take the gift home. These items will last a very long time and do not require any special care to take care of them. The benches often go to the cemetery or a special spot in the garden. Every time the wind chime makes noise, it’s a reminder of the person who has passed. Customers will often light the candle on their birthday or anniversary. They will often have the lantern in a prominent location in the house and every time they walk by it they will think of their loved one. Every time you cover up with one of the afghans, they will know it was sent in memory of their loved one. These gift items make the perfect sympathy gift, especially when you know they will be put to use.
Personalized Gifts
There are countless personalized gifts that you can buy for the best sympathy gift that are not your traditional funeral home delivered items. It all depends on the deceased, how large the family is and how close you are to the family. Some of these personalized gifts take a lot of thought on how you want them to look, so they need to be specially ordered. We are in the engraving business so we will highlight some of our best sympathy gifts. Most of these sympathy gifts are given at special occasions throughout the year for birthdays, anniversaries, Christmas, mother’s day, father’s day, and wedding gifts.
A very popular sympathy gift we often send for the family of deceased loved on is a cutting board written in the deceased person’s hand writing. As you can see in the pictures above, we capture the recipe almost exactly how they wrote it and we can also incorporate a picture of that person as well. These gifts are not your typical send to the funeral home sympathy gifts but extremely thoughtful gifts that are given on those special holidays and anniversaries.
Items like key chains, pocket knives, and money clips are the perfect size to put a message from an old card or letter on them. These sympathy gifts are usually given in multiples to all the brothers and sisters, kids, or grandkids. They are relatively inexpensive that can be carried just about all the time.
The ornaments and the little in loving memory signs are just nice gifts to give as a constant reminder of a loved one. Of course the ornaments can be displayed on your Christmas tree but can also be displayed on your favorite flower vase.
When trying to pick out the best sympathy gift, just remember the person receiving the gift just feels loved when they receive it. Don’t think you missed your window just because the funeral is over, send something to their house weeks or months later.