Be my valentine...

This is actually my first valentine ever, given to me when I was seven months old by some guy named Herv. Herv? I’m not sure who that is… apparently Herv and I lost touch at some point. Well, you know how busy life can get when you’re seven months old. I had to stare at mobiles and eat pureed stuff and master the art of crawling. I just had no time for a relationship. (Seriously, I don’t know who “Herv” was, but my mom kept the valentine and wrote “Lisa’s first valentine” on the back. It was tucked into the pages of my baby book, which my mom gave to me a few years ago.)

So happy Valentine’s Day, everyone. Although, as I’ve said before, Valentine’s Day is really just a holiday that Hallmark made up, in an effort to pressure people into buying more cards. I mean, isn’t it kind of silly to have one specific “day” to tell and show people you love them? Shouldn’t we be doing that ALL the time? And think about it – wouldn’t it mean more if someone gave you a gift at some random time during the year for no reason other than to say “I love you,” as opposed to being pressured into buying a gift for Valentine’s Day? EVERYONE buys gifts on Valentine’s Day… but a really clever and thoughtful person might buy a gift on, say, the second Tuesday in August. Just my own crazy opinion…

I don’t know about everyone else, but when I was in elementary school, we were always expected to buy valentines for all our classmates. That way, everyone got an equal number of valentines and no one felt left out. It was a little tedious, writing, “to so-and-so, from Lisa” on the back of all those cards. And every Valentine’s Day, we’d have a class project where we would construct “valentine receptacles” out of construction paper, and hang them on the edge of our desks. We’d then spend an hour or so walking around the room, depositing valentines in all the construction paper containers, and then return to our own desks to sort through all the paper sentiments.

But eventually you grow up and realize that life isn’t always systematically doled out in a fair fashion. Like in high school, where they’d sell “valentine carnations” in the cafeteria every February. You could buy one for a dollar for whoever you liked, and it would be delivered to the recipient on Valentine’s Day morning in homeroom. So every Valentine’s Day, there’d be a big show of calling out the names of all the popular kids, while the unpopular kids remained unrecognized (as usual). Some people would get five or ten carnations, running to the front of the room to collect their prizes and arranging them on their desks, until they looked like weird little Rose Parade floats. My senior year, I was very surprised to hear my own name called – someone bought ME a carnation? My mind turned over the possibilities of who my secret admirer would be – could it be Ed, that guy I’d had a crush on since junior year? Or maybe Doug, the cute and popular (but really sweet) captain of the football team, who always made a point to say hi to me. I suppose it could be Paul, who I’d sat across from in that homeroom class all four years of high school and who was constantly asking me to borrow pencils (he never returned them). I hoped it wasn’t Paul…

When I got back to my desk with the carnation, I eagerly opened the attached note to see who had sent it. “Happy Valentine’s Day! From, Jennifer.” Jennifer? I turned my head to the right, where Jennifer, who was sort of a friend but more a friend-of-a-friend, smiled and said, “I always feel bad when you don’t get one.” I thanked her sweetly, but something inside me wanted to shred that pile of carnations she had on her desk into thousands of tiny little petals…

Oh well… high school ends (thank goodness) and life moves on. And eventually Valentine’s Day is less about quantity and more about quality. And oh yeah – it’s also about Hallmark selling cards… :)