I love Valentine’s Day. Candy, flowers, sweet things, red and pink, bubbles, ribbons, sparkles, puppies…I want to be marinated in this festive crap. I’m serious; I’m even sitting here wearing a ridiculous flower in my hair:
Okay. That’s too much. My teeth hurt from all of that sweetness. And to be honest, I grabbed that flower off one of my Chanel boxes and superglued it to a hair clip while riding the trainer this morning. So really, this is probably more appropriate:
But it’s still a great holiday. What? You hate it and think it’s manufactured by Hallmark? That’s so original! You must be the first person ever to boldly make that assertion! It’s a good thing that there are no other holidays that are over-commercialized [Christmas, Easter, Fourth of July, Halloween, Every Other Holiday That Is An Excuse To Sell Cars At A Discount].
However, while you are taking a stand, I am taking champagne, brownies, flowers, candy, homemade Valentines, and a chance to enjoy a day that is less boring than yesterday and tomorrow. It’s not just about romantic love – my favorite moments today have involved expressions of love between friends and family. That seems like an awesome reason for a holiday and it makes me feel pretty damn happy.
Celebrating a day in honor of St. Valentine originated, I once was told, with a test of ars poetica among Chaucer and a couple other famed poets of his day, whose names I have forgotten because I have been away from graduate school for too long. At any rate, so the story goes, the idea was to determine who could write the best poem to the patron of love. In those days, Cupid was not some milksop little cherub with butterfly wings slinging heart-tipped arrows and candy necklaces, he was the terminator, a monster most often depicted in verse as more likely to transfix the target-lover through the eye with a wickedly barbed spear-like arrow of doom than spout sweet nothings of the you complete me variety. These were more simple and more graphic times. It’s all been watered down by Hallmark and corporate catering to the least common denominator I suppose. Anywho, nice pics, Linds. Looking forward to seeing you on the bike again soon. Happy VD. 🙂
I love Valentine’s Day, too…I loved it when I was a kid, I loved it when I was going through a horrendous divorce, I loved it last year when I was falling in love…I’m trying to show my kid that it’s about doing something special for the people close to us and maybe to the people least expecting it. It’s working…he’s the only first grader that wore a tie to school that day and he brought flowers to his best friend, Grace.