What is a grave blanket, anyway? Everything to know about the traditional gesture

"I've got my love to keep me warm," goes the old holiday song.

For those of us less fortunate — those who have passed on to a chillier world — there are grave blankets.

Perhaps they're a holiday custom in your family. Or perhaps you're one of the people who pass by the roadside advertisements for "grave blankets" each December and picture a patchwork quilt thrown over a cemetery plot.

That's not what a grave blanket is.

"People think it's like a bed blanket," said Joe DiDonna, who makes — with assistance — some 3,500 to 4,000 every holiday for Charlie's Nursery & Garden Center in North Arlington, New Jersey.

Relative to a wreath

A grave blanket is a close cousin of the Christmas wreath. It's an arrangement of evergreen cuttings, in rectangular shape, that is placed over the grave of a loved one during the Christmas season.

"For a blanket, we'll use balsam, and on some blankets we'll add white pine, which gives it a softer look, and then we'll start to decorate," said DiDonna, whose family, including father Nick Sr. and brother Nick Jr., have been making these holiday remembrances since the 1970s.

"The most popular ones will have a nice velvet bow on it, or natural pinecones, or colored balls," he said. "You can go on from there, adding odds and ends. We do custom themes. Some people want green, or they want burgundy, or they want blue — because their dad, or whoever, liked blue."

The custom seems to have originated in the Scandinavian countries, where the winters are severe, and came over to the U.S. with the Swedish and Norwegian settlers. Not surprisingly, it's still most popular in the upper Midwest, in states like Minnesota and North Dakota, with large Scandinavian populations. But it has caught on elsewhere as well.

In New Jersey, you'll see placards advertising them at nurseries and garden centers as soon as Thanksgiving is well over.

"Usually Black Friday is the kickoff for us," DiDonna said. "We have people from Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, calling us about them. We've had people from Hawaii. Sometimes those places out of state don't carry them. Or else they're on the cheaper side, a cookie-cutter blanket, not anything special."

Made by hand

After 50 years of doing this, DiDonna and his family have it down to a science. The COVID years, in particular, taught them to work quickly and efficiently. In those days, alas, demand was high.

"The year after COVID, when everyone was passing, we learned to speed up our process," he said. "Unfortunately, a lot of people passed away. That was a year we couldn't keep anything in stock."

All of their grave blankets are handmade. Greens, pinecones and decorations are affixed to a Styrofoam framework.

The work is not impersonal. Indeed, it could hardly be more personal.

"We get a lot of people who ask for stuff for baby's graves," he said. "They want something small and elegant. Those are always hard to make. We get people who come in crying, especially if somebody just passed. Those stories are tough. It's hard when you're making stuff for younger people, or a Marine vet who died. They'll give you a backstory of who it was. It's almost a little bit of a therapy session."

There's another reason the business is personal for the DiDonna family.

They are not just vendors of grave blankets. They also take part in the tradition.

A family custom

"To me, it's for respect and remembrance," said Vinnie Catanese, DiDonna's uncle from Lyndhurst, New Jersey.

"As a little boy, I used to go with my father, and we used to go to the grave of an uncle or a grandmother and we used to put the blankets down," Catanese said. "And my father used to say, 'Now it's down, now they're warm.' That made me feel good, as a little boy."

When he grew up, Catanese — in his turn — laid grave blankets on his father, mother, father-in-law and mother-in-law. But the most personal of all, the one that hits closest to home — literally — is the one he leaves every year for his wife, Carol-Ann.

She died 15 years ago. Three days after Christmas.

"My wife loved Christmas, and to put this down is a sign of remembering her," Catanese said. "She had been sick, and we had a lot of conversations before she passed away. When I put the blanket down, I just sit there and remember all the good times. I remember the trees and the presents. The blanket's all green, and it has the gold decorations, and red. I know the colors that she liked."

And as he remembers his wife and his loved ones, he can look around the cemetery and see all the other people remembering theirs.

"In Holy Cross Cemetery [in North Arlington], where she's buried, every grave has a blanket," Catanese said. "You see this blanket, that blanket, big ones, small ones."

Evergreens on the grave

Unlike flowers, which wilt in the cold, a grave blanket will stay green and inviting until mid-January. That's the usual limit, in any case, allowed by cemetery regulations.

Staked to the ground, to prevent it from blowing away, the grave blanket is a reminder to all passers-by — and to the deceased themselves — that we the living have not forgotten them at holiday time.

"It looks like somebody cares," DiDonna said. "Everything starts to die in the wintertime, or go dormant, so this gives a little bit of green, a little bit of life, to the plot. As everything else around is starting to look barren, there's this little square of life."

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Where did grave blankets come from? What to know about tradition