I love the holidays. Any excuse to get together with family and celebrate – I’m in. Even the Super Bowl is considered a holiday for most, and although I don’t know a single thing about football, I’m always at a Super Bowl party, just so I can get together with friends and family.
The one holiday I don’t celebrate, however, is Valentine’s Day. Never has there been a holiday so commercialized as that one, and I just won’t participate in something like that.
Valentine’s Day is supposed to be the day you celebrate your partner. Your husband, your wife, your boyfriend, your girlfriend. Love on them extra hard and buy them all sorts of crap they don’t need, like chocolate, flowers, and jewelry.
Now, Valentine’s Day is not just for lovers, but for kids, as well. Kids are expected to bring Valentine’s Day cards to their friends at school and are usually accompanied by a treat or toy of some kind. And I’m pretty sure we’re expected to buy Valentine’s Day gifts for our own kids, as well.
But shouldn’t we be celebrating the ones we love every day – not just on February 14th – the day that was chosen for us? And why do we need to buy a gift, just to say ‘I love you’?
I’ve never understood when friends of mine would go crazy trying to find the “perfect” Valentine’s Day gift for their partner, often spending hundreds of dollars on something they think might fit the bill.
It’s Ludacris, I say.
Love the ones you’re with, daily. Don’t go all out just one day a year and that’s it. People want to feel loved all the time. Surprise your partner with a random (inexpensive!) gift sometimes. Write them a love note on a Wednesday in March. Go out for dinner on a Saturday night in June.
Celebrate each other ALL THE TIME. Don’t give in to this commercialized holiday and spend gobs of money to show your partner how much you love them on ONE day.
My husband and I have never celebrated Valentine’s Day. We don’t need more crap coming into our house, and we don’t need to wait for someone else to tell us when it’s time to say ‘I love you’ to each other. Instead, we celebrate each other year-round, with regular surprise gifts, love notes, and date nights.
We don’t give Valentine’s Day gifts to our kids, either, and they know not to expect any. We do let them give cards to their friends at school, but that’s only so that they can feel involved with their classes (since pretty much all of the kids give Valentine’s). I always buy cards after Valentine’s Day, so I pay next to nothing for them.
How do you feel about Valentine’s Day? Do you celebrate?
Cassie Howard
Cassie Howard has taught many Canadians how to save money and live frugally – without sucking the fun out of life. Cassie is currently a business coach for women entrepreneurs that want to grow a successful, service-based, online business, making six-figures or more.
View all posts by Cassie Howard
Nancy Gibbs is the editor of TIME. This piece was originally published in the February 7, 2008 issue of TIME.
I’m sentimental about many things: the lumpy feel of a baby’s unused feet, the metallic smell of the air before the first snow, the last scene in It’s a Wonderful Life. But Valentine’s Day leaves me cold. It’s a holiday that has no idea of what it’s really celebrating. Or at least no idea of whom it celebrates: St. Valentine could be any of half a dozen Christian martyrs whom the early church recruited to clean up and bless pagan fertility festivals. Of the top candidates, the best known is a priest named Valentinus, who was beheaded by Emperor Claudius the Cruel on Feb. 14, A.D. 269. Upon slim evidence, whole layers of legend are stacked: that Valentinus performed secret weddings after Claudius banned marriage to prevent soldiers from deserting his armies; that he refused to deny Christ and so was thrown in prison, where he healed the jailer’s blind daughter; that he fell in love with her and left a note in the cracks of his cell the night before his execution, “From your Valentine.”
Read more: What To Do If Your Partner Speaks a Different Love Language
Now martyrdom is admirable, even preferable, in a saint, but it is terrible in a relationship in which generosity demands payment in guilt. And a celebration that once featured bachelors pulling women’s names out of an urn like a door prize and a belief that the first person you spotted on the morning of Feb. 14 would be your mate for life doesn’t say much for romance. (Some maids were taught that if they awoke and saw a blackbird, they would marry a clergyman; a bluebird meant a poor man; a robin meant a sailor.) Over the years, Valentine became the patron saint of engaged couples and happy marriages, but also of beekeepers and, of course, greeting-card manufacturers. Love comes with a sting, and at a price.
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In the interests of domestic harmony, I should say that my wonderful husband has always handled the day’s customs with flair. Our daughters like it for the candy, which now comes in quantities rivaled only by Halloween, with Tootsie Rolls taped to the cards kids hand out. I have no problem with the holiday for 8-year-olds, now that it has shed its Darwinian savagery. Children are expected to bring a valentine for every classmate, unlike the days of our youth, when the teachers would collect the cards in a big red box and then call out names one by one, in a public accounting of exactly how many friends each child actually had.
On the other hand, the idea of 8-year-olds’ celebrating a holiday that shimmies into view wearing a negligee does seem odd. But consider the huge commercial stakes: “The tradition of sending and receiving classroom valentines,” observes American Greetings, which owns a $1.8 billion piece of the “social expression” industry, “is often a child’s first experience with greeting cards.” A billion cards are sent every year, second only to Christmastime, and 85% of them by women. For this we can thank Esther Howland, an entrepreneurial 1847 Mount Holyoke grad, whose father owned a stationery store and who came up with the idea of mass-producing valentines. The Mother of the Valentine never married but did get very rich, racking up annual sales equivalent to more than $2 million today.
For many of us, though, Valentine’s Day only pretends to celebrate what we like about love while actually undermining it. True romance comes unscheduled, unruly, “a madness most discreet,” quoth Romeo. Over time, as it ripens into devotion, still it improvises, a favor rendered, a sudden kiss, a private joke, flowers for no reason. Its expression is the very opposite of the fretful, “pre-order now, or be left with drugstore chocolates” connivances that the day promotes. For those who feel well loved, every day, of course, is Valentine’s. For the rest, no card can console.
Read more: Why I’m Not Marriage Material
That’s why the holiday lends itself so nicely to ridicule. Valentine’s Day has inspired its own insurgency, “Singles Awareness Day,” in which the unattached celebrate their solitude with a saucy “Happy SAD day.” Any holiday that triggers guerrilla opposition should give us pause. “Finding the right Valentine’s Day gift is probably the most difficult shopping experience in any man’s life,” warns AskMen.com which notes that unlike Christmas or birthday presents, these gifts reflect not only taste and affection “but your degree of commitment as well.” Experts argue over subtexts: Is giving lingerie a turn-on or just tacky? Restaurants sweeten the menu and hike the prices; Christian websites offer valentine messages from God. You can buy a heart-shaped potato on eBay. It comes in a red box.
There’s nothing wrong, of course, with delighting in love and honoring friendship and stopping in the bleak midwinter to tickle the people we love. But it’s also a good sign of psychosocial health if the day just saunters by and winks, and you feel no need to pay attention. The minute it feels like a duty, it has lost its purpose. “Love sought is good,” Shakespeare observed, “but given unsought is better.”
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