Mystery

*sleep deprived*

You may as well ask why the ancient Egyptians bothered to paint their sarcophagi in pretty designs and patterns when they were going to bury them into the ground anyway where nobody was meant to see them.

Varnish also makes wood look nice.

Probably similar reasons to why we have a ceremonial burial at all rather than just process the body for its raw materials. Sentimentalism.

Blimey, Fry looks young.

Yeah I mean, some people just put the bodies in cardboard boxes, I'm pretty sure there's someone in my family that wants that but I cannie remember who...sentimentalism be a bisch.

We also varnish wood to make it look nice. I suppose we could bury or cremate our dead in recycled FedEx boxes, but I suspect that many would take exception to the thought of taking their final voyage, or their loved ones taking it, in a reused cardboard box.

Besides, everyone dresses very smartly for the occasion. And let's face it, at a funeral the deceased is very much the star of the show. When everyone else has made such an effort it's a bit jarring to find grandpa still in the hospital gown he died in. So some poor sod dresses him up. Then they go into a box, as is the way of things. At a closed casket ceremony, or the people seated at the back in an open one, the box may be all they see. So that has to look nice, too.

But no one wants to then haul the body out of the box and put it into a biodegradable compost bag or something suitable for burying, nor do they want the level of smartness to take such a downward turn during interment. There's never really a good time to remove the body to a cheaper box for being put in the ground.

Cremation is different. The box rolled in past a curtain or door and is never seen again. Recycling the box for the next funeral would be quite the money saver, and might guarantee that the subsequent ashes are indeed the remains of beloved Graham and not 200 grams of pine ash. There could well be a pair of sweaty, burly men hoisting the body out of the coffin and into the furnace with a pitchfork.

Jewish burials in most of the world are performed in a plain pine box. In Israel they go one step further and merely wrap the body in a cotton shroud.

In Ghana they take the opposite view.

There are stories of shifty undertakers detatching the brass handles and anything that won't burn to use again - or sell.

Whether this includes jewellery found on the corpse depends on the level of shiftiness.

When i die, I wanna be buried in a reused FedEx box... ... all chopped up.... in someones yard.

We cremated my dad in a cardbox coffin with all this in mind. Back in 1997, cardboard coffins were a relatively new idea, and was almost as expensive as a normal coffin with brass fittings for some stupid reason and we wondered why we bothered.

where's that Ench when you need him?