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Remembrance Ceremony Around the Holidays

By Benjamin Martin, Executive Director, NTI

As we look ahead to 2026, NTI is intensifying our focus on community creation. We're launching a Community Creators Campaign—a series of sponsored offerings designed to connect and inspire celebrants and ceremonialists to bring transformative ritual to their communities. 

As an example of the kind of work we'll be celebrating, here's a community ceremony that might inspire your own practice. 

The Light from our Hearts Ceremony

This time of year can surface a lot of tender feelings given the lead-up to the holidays. It is often a time when we feel our loved ones’ absence most poignantly. This is an opportune time for a celebrant to step up and offer an empathetic ceremony of solace, remembrance and ritual to their community.

For the last five years, I have had the privilege to officiate and serve as master of ceremonies for a heartwarming event called Light from our Hearts that occurs in the second week of December. My first two years of officiating were during COVID and involved a Zoom ceremony and the last few years were at a local, small theater/stage. This event was hosted by The Natural Funeral and Trail Winds Hospice centered in Boulder, Colorado and invitations were sent to their clients and their own deathcare professionals “to remember and honor our departed loved ones.”

The ceremony always builds to the denouement of the evening–the reading of names of those loved ones who have died. It is always amazing to me the impact that a reverential reading of the name of someone who has recently died can have on the vibe in the room and on the heart of each one in attendance. For the in-person ceremonies, each attendee was invited to come up to light a candle in memory of their special one and to plant the candle into a makeshift sand box on the remembrance table (see image attached). For the Zoom ceremonies, we invited each attendee to bring a candle to the Zoom room and to then place the name of their loved one in the Chat to be included in the reading of the names and to simultaneously light a candle and hold it up to the Zoom camera.

Creating a Meaningful Experience

Just as I would approach a life celebration for an individual by finding a theme, scouting out a metaphor that might resonate with those attending and latching onto a symbol that captures the essence of the person, so did I settle on a theme for the community event (“Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.”), scout out a metaphor (“As it turns out, you don’t see the light in a hermetically sealed box—It is only when the light hits upon an object of matter—only until it has an object to illuminate, do you see the light.”) and look for symbols (“Allow this cairn to mark this time of remembrance and to serve as a trail marker for this important place along the journey of the heart.”) that might capture the essence of the collective grief in the room. Light from our Hearts was interwoven with musical performance, poetry readings, storytelling and inspirational messages of comfort. While this mix of media and genres is not required, I have always found that the variety reaches broadly across the room and serves up a complete meal, so to speak, as food for the soul.

I have found that serving as an officiant/master of ceremonies for this event is a great chance to connect with funeral directors and allow people to experience the qualitative difference in having an MC who is skilled in ceremony and ritual as the officiant.  If you do get a chance to recruit artists to join in the ceremony, it gives you a chance to build camaraderie across genres and collectively create a great sustenance ceremony that nourishes the hearts of those who attend.

Getting Started in Your Community

 Here is a bit of advice and recommended steps:

1. Identify a funeral home with which to work
2. Approach the funeral director and suggest they identify a local hospice or two with which they might like to collaborate
3. Work with their respective social media contacts to deliver an invitation to their mutual client bases
4. Agree on a theme with your partners and craft a draft ceremony for review
5. Host a dress rehearsal meetup with all participants to agree on length of each contribution and review the order of the service
6. Follow up the event with a satisfaction survey to solicit feedback

 Interested to know more? Some resources:

• A video of the 2023 Light of the Heart ceremony can be found here:

• Have follow-on questions? I'd love to hear from you at [email protected].

About the Author

Benjamin Martin, Executive Director of Natural Transitions Institute (NTI). Benjamin holds an M.A. in Curriculum Development and Instructional Technology from the University of Colorado. After decades of executive leadership in the software industry, Benjamin transitioned into full-time celebrancy in 2021. He is the author of Love Songs from the – Between –, a collection of daily poetic and contemplative reflections, and currently facilitates the funeral celebrancy certification course for NTI and crafts one-of-a-kind ceremonies for his clients.