While Christmas is a happy time to enjoy with family and friends, the festive season can be bittersweet when remembering loved ones who have died.

With this in mind, The Bereavement Register – part of UK-based data quality company The REaD Group – has come up with an imaginative way of offering comfort and support to the bereaved . . . by enabling them to send personal messages of remembrance to the stars on Christmas Day.

Messages will be beamed into outer space at precisely 1am (GMT) on December 25 by Deep Space Communications Network, based in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

The Bereavement Register’s manager, Luci Penn (pictured below), explained: “The Register has been helping families of the deceased since its inception in 2000. As Christmas can be a particularly difficult time of year for many, we’ve been keen to find a means to provide further assistance to grieving family and friends. When the opportunity to broadcast messages into space became available in recent weeks, we thought this would resonate with those feeling the loss of a loved one.

  “Expressing one’s emotions is an essential part of the grieving process and, as the night sky is often a place which all of us look to occasionally for solace, The Bereavement Register hopes that everyone here in the UK will participate in what is essentially the world’s first interstellar ‘group hug’.”

All messages must be received by 12 midnight on December 20 to allow time to prepare for transmission into space – visit the website for details: www.rememberingyouthischristmas.com