You can't tell from the gates of Hollybrook Cemetery in Southampton, but it's like a Disney cartoon inside. Click the "Daily Mail" article to see some examples.

Emily Dickinson’s words about religious worship (“Some keep the Sabbath going to the Church —
/ I keep it, staying at Home”) should apply equally to mourning. For some people it’s a private occasion and for others it’s a New Orleans funeral. No one should tell someone else how to mourn.

Marginal Revolution pointed me to an article by Bel Mooney in the Daily Mail about colorful graveyards in England, which are overflowing with bright balloons, toys and sculptures of cartoon characters. Some people are not happy about it. An excerpt:

“There is a growing trend for graves to be festooned with toys, plastic ornaments and trinkets, balloons, wind-chimes and hanging objects.

The sight and sound of these exhibitions grows ever more exuberant – so much so that an Essex council is introducing a one-month limit on what can be put on a grave. Other councils are surely likely to follow.

Traditionalists argue that graveyards are places of peace and contemplation and those who visit to lay flowers on Mum’s grave shouldn’t have to negotiate their way past piles of soft toys or be disturbed by the cacophony of competing wind-chimes.

But for their part, those who want to heap graves with cuddly toys protest their right to remember their dead in whatever way they choose. Which means that anything goes, from a gravestone in the shape of a Newcastle United shirt, to life-sized effigies of the deceased, to resin pigs and dogs, plastic dolphins and even meerkats.

I would never use the word ‘tacky’ to describe such displays – though many people do. It sounds too snobbish, too much to do with a certain kind of taste.”