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| Doodle drawn by Stephanie LaFreniere |
What’s the first thing that comes to your head when you think of Valentine’s Day? You probably think of love. In fact, that’s probably what most people think of – love. You’re not wrong; actually, you couldn’t be any more right. Valentine’s Day is all about love, but not in the right ways, and certainly not for the right reasons.
Like any holiday, Valentine’s Day is a huge money maker. One billion Valentine's Day cards are exchanged every year, according to nationalstationaryshow.com and the Greeting Card Association. That's 1,000,000,000. This makes Valentine's Day the second most popular card-sending holiday after Christmas.
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For this was on seynt Volantynys day"For this was Saint Valentine's Day, when every bird cometh there to choose his mate." Picture and Poem courtesy of Wikipedia |
The major flaw in Valentine’s Day, other than the corruptive influence of money, is love. If love is the main “theme” of Valentine’s Day, wouldn’t that make the whole holiday a sham? Or worse, wouldn't that make the concept of love a sham?
Don’t get me wrong, love is great -- wonderful, in fact, but for some reason we like to pretend that it rises to the forefront of our collective conscience on Valentine’s Day. You don’t see a lot of people going out of their way to buy chocolates or flowers for their significant other on any other day of the year, or going on many fancy dress-up dates. Why should Valentine’s Day be any different than any other day of the year? Why should this one day be celebrated for love? Shouldn’t we celebrate love all the time? Having love celebrated only one day of the year makes people not appreciate the idea of love as much, or the idea of showing love. It creates pressure to give gifts to your special someone. The pressure would cease to exist if showing real love and affection weren't so “out of the ordinary” on a daily basis. Why isolate “love” and its fancy trappings to one day?
Valentine’s Day shouldn’t be necessary to remind you to express your love and appreciation for someone. There are 365 days in a year (366 in a leap year) where someone can show their admiration for people whom they care about. Valentine’s Day is only one of them, but it's the only one with one billion cards to show “affection.”
Check out another great Valentines day story!
Check out another great Valentines day story!
Holidays are special commemorations. Just because we have a Thanksgiving does not mean we should give up being thankful for the other 364 days in a year (or 365 this year), but Thanksgiving serves as a reminder of the importance of valuing what we normally take for granted. Valentine's Day commemorates the power of love (cue Huey Lewis), but that doesn't mean we shouldn't love for the rest of the year. Here's another example: birthdays are celebrations of our birth and our lives in general; they look back at how far we've come in our lives. Birthdays celebrate life, but they do not mean we should not live for the other days of the year.
ReplyDeleteYes, Valentine's Day is heavily commercialized, but that hardly means we should resent it. So what if we send a billion cards annually. We have to keep the USPS afloat somehow. Kidding aside, I think it's a positive thing, not a negative thing, that we send a billion cards each year. At least we're communicating.
I'm not saying I resent Valentine's Day, and I'm not saying that sending cards is a bad thing, it was just an example of all the revenue Valentine's Day yields; I could have just as well mentioned chocolates or stuffed animals, cards were just easier. Valentine's Day is more based around making money than it is with love, which was more of the point I was trying to get across, but still not the main idea.
DeleteThe last line of this piece was supposed to be "Valentine's Day is only one of them, and it shouldn't be the only one." My editor changed it, for a reason beyond my knowledge (I guess it still kind of gets across the same point the way it is now, but not as straight forward or friendly), but, what you're saying is basically what I was trying to say; Valentine's Day commemorates love, and all its wonders, but it shouldn't be the only day that we communicate our affections and appreciations. The fact is, though, that it does seem to be the only day. Sure, there are some people who do show their love and appreciation year round, but they're the exception to the rule. It shouldn't be out of the ordinary to show how much you care about someone.