The Lighting of Lanterns

One I was a boy, the whole family would come out and light at the same time. As I grow older, less and less of us show up at all, let alone bringing anyone else to the celebration.
I don't know, maybe it's not a big deal, or maybe the trials of life keep getting in the way.
Perhaps I will be the last one here...

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When is it okay to finally forget the dead? You'll get a different answer depending on who you ask, but it's a near-universal cultural fact that people want to remember the dead and develop ways to memorialize them.
On the Far Eastern Continent, a popular tradition is that of the lantern memorial. As the name implies, in most places it involves the lighting of paper lanters which are then released en mass and let go in a spectacular show, meant to memorialize all those in ones family that has passed away.
The tradition varies in small and somewhat insignificant ways depending on where one is at any given time. Are the lanterns handmade, or made by the church? Are they painted, or left stark and bare? Does the youngest generation retrieve them after the ritual, or are they let go completely?

This tradition has been used by political forces in the Far East to try and make a point that the old morals are degrading in the modern era. These particular political actors point to the lantern rituals as an example of this due to the decline in participation numbers across the continent.
As stated, they say this in an attempt to put the fear of societal degradation with this amorphous threat though if you ask the younger generation, it's simply that they don't particularly care for the ritual. The perception of loss and the memorial of the dead have merely changed to them and they simply view the tradition as something their parents did, and that they remembered from their childhood.