Valentine’s Day again?
Ugh. Are you kidding?
First of all, I hate Hallmark. I hate their cards. I hate their movies. I hate their commercials. I even hate their stupid little crown logo.
But more importantly, I hate them for their manufacturing of artificial holidays like Valentine’s Day. Sure, it was a genius stroke of marketing. But there is so much to be mad about.
Of course I know that Hallmark didn’t actually create Valentine’s Day. According to “Someone on Wikipedia,” the Catholic Church designated February 14th to honor more than one Christian martyr named Valentine on that day. (The use of italics is mine. More than one? Really? That seems like a topic worthy of discussion in itself, but I’m going to leave it right there for now.) I suspect that it was, once again, a brilliant marketing move because people made pilgrimages to these sites to see the bones of these martyrs. As a writer of horror and lover of Halloween, I confess I do kinda like that. But along the way, people spent lots of money, thereby boosting the economy–well, mostly the Church’s coffers–on fake holy relics, papal indulgences, wagon wheels, and candy hearts on which they wrote love messages.
OK, I made up the last one to see if you were still paying attention.
So where did all the romantic stuff, like Cupid and his bow and arrow come from? Most likely from an unintended association with the Roman fertility celebration of the Lupercal which was held February 13th through 16th. The Church created its own holiday intending to replace the pagan one, but just like All Saints Day and Halloween, the pagan rituals and imagery merged with and eventually overtook the Christian ones.
Alas, the best-laid plans…
One of the more “interesting” customs associated with Valentine’s Day, whether it originated in Roman times or the Middle Ages (this is disputed) was the practice of men drawing the names of maidens from a lottery to “couple” with them. (See how I tidied all that up there? Pro tip: Just stick quotation marks around any “offensive” word to clean it up. Or to spice up an otherwise “inoffensive” word. You’re “welcome.”)
The Church changed all that by having maidens randomly draw the names of apostles from the altar. That was tons of fun, I’m sure. “Ooooh, I drew Simon the Zealot! Who’d you get?”
“I got Matthew, the tax collector. He’s dreamy.”
Thrills galore. I don’t know what they did once they drew the names. Maybe they collected them over the years and traded them like baseball cards. I’m betting Judas Iscariot was really hard to get.
Some people believe that the original drawing of names to create couples (aka “couples”) led to sending Valentine love letters. And THAT led to a horrible practice that inflicted irreparable harm on millions of elementary school children.
Well, on one, at least.
It was customary on Valentine’s Day for school children to create little mailboxes out of shoeboxes which they decorated with pink and red construction paper hearts. My mother was a first-grade school teacher and she LOVED making these. So my box did look pretty good.
For a girl.
That point was brought home repeatedly to me by a number of my male acquaintances. Pre-adolescent boys are not known for their sense of gender equality or awareness. I learned by the fourth grade to make my own boxes no matter how unattractive they were.
Anyway, after we lined up all our Valentine boxes along the window sill, we then went around and stuffed little Valentine cards which we had laboriously signed and addressed the night before into them. But this was the opportunity for the undeniable and incomparable cruelty of children to surface, the prime time for one’s unpopularity to be broadcast to the world. It was when we collected our boxes and emptied them on our desks, hoping to find a message of love from that one person whom we had had a crush on since the second grade, and hopefully, catch a glance from that certain someone that indicated a love requited. That and to see how many cards we had collected.
Imagine Charlie Brown on Valentine’s Day, emptying his shoebox with remarkably non-heart-shaped objects (“I had a little trouble with the scissors”) taped haphazardly all over it onto his desk. “I got a rock,” I imagine he’d say. And his lack of friends would be highlighted on the six o’clock news.
So that’s why I––I mean Charlie––hated Valentine’s Day.
Fortunately, my wife shares, or at least understands, my lack of enthusiasm for celebrating this grandest Hallmark of “holidays.” (See what I did there?) We may or may not exchange cards, but if we do, they will be humorous. Hopefully even sarcastic. By and large, the 14th of February will come and go with little fanfare in our household.
But I just might go out and buy a pair of shoes for the sole reason of being able to throw the box in the trash.
