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February 14, 2006
Love your valentine
Now is a bad time of the year to hate the color pink. It’s an even worse time to go shopping if one cannot tolerate the unavoidable commercial barrage of visuals containing everything flowery, heart-shaped, shimmering, and expensive. Before Easter can bring pastels and colorful hues to replace the dreary winter shopping landscape, bold reds are introduced alongside vibrant pinks and majestic whites to signal the coming of another glorious but detested holiday, Valentine’s Day.
Although the tolerance for and significance of Feb. 14 varies for each person, a symphony of irritated exclamations, sighs, and angry groans seem to emanate from the city in one long, frustrated, collective cry every year on Valentine’s Day. Exorbitant amounts of cash are tortuously removed from wallets to pay for fancy restaurants, gifts of luxury, and the beloved red flowers that are apt to wilt and die before their stems hit the vase. Expectations for gifts, creative planning, and special behavior on this day are great, as can be the accompanying disappointment from wanting too much out of a date who doesn’t share the same assumption that love is more than a box of red-wrapped Hershey’s.
Some people rejoice at the thought of Valentine’s Day, considering it an opportunity to hand the kids off to a babysitter or ignore a stack of work in order to spend time with the person they love. Whether it’s the enticing perfume of the roses or the sugar rush from sampling two pounds of chocolate, the sweet celebration of Valentine’s Day has provided the romantic background to many marriage proposals, weddings, and moments of pretending that you and your significant other really do get along.
Valentine’s Day has bonding potential, whether it is couple-unifying or just a reason to dine out or see a movie with friends and family. As much as the holiday offers, it is often met with indifference or the uncomfortable feeling of obligation. For those who obstinately refuse to recognize the existence of Cupid’s Day, it is not too late to be persuaded to accept and enjoy the respite that Valentine’s day offers from a cold, bleak winter February. Some reasons, out of many, to enjoy yourself without the typical Feb. 14 woes:
It’s a day to express yourself and your feelings for another person. Whether it’s writing your crush a little note or cooking a homemade meal for someone whose company you can stomach and even find pleasant, this is a chance to do something out of the ordinary without feeling awkward or unexpectedly peculiar.
Gifts, dates, compliments, and other displays of affection don’t have to be cheesy. Unoriginal tactics that follow the same boring flowers-and-candy precedent transcend anything thoughtful in terms of bad taste. Like the guy on a pajama infomercial said, “Get creative.”
It is a holiday and a useful interruption to the mundane month of February. St. Patrick’s Day and the Fourth of July only come once a year, and it’s not encouraged to celebrate one’s birthday more than twice a year. Holidays are rare, so we should take advantage of them instead of shrugging them off.
Valentine’s Day is not intended to alienate and annoy single people. Valentine’s Day is about celebrating love like Thanksgiving is about showing gratitude. Though it is commonly regarded as a romantic event, this time centers on appreciating the people in your life that you care for and love. Being single around this holiday doesn’t preclude the celebration of it; you can re-define Valentine’s Day to be an enjoyable time spent with friends, family, and others you care about without feeling that a romantic void excludes you from the merry sentiment of the day.
It’s not a corporate holiday if you don’t buy things. Even if conspiracy theorists’ natural suspicions of the holiday prove correct and the great plot of how Valentine’s Day was concocted by companies in order to sell more cards and candy is discovered, originality of expression does not require consumerism. If the idea of corporate holidays is bothersome to you, not buying these items takes the evil capitalism out of the celebration and leaves it with only the basic roots of appreciation, love, consideration, and enjoyment that put the heart in Heart Day.
Posted by dwright at February 14, 2006 02:12 PM
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