Spread the Love!!!

*Note: The day I wrote this I spent 2 hours in the dentists chair getting a gum graft and was on copious amounts (a quarter of a quarter of vicodin, I’m a light-weight) of pain killers. While this blog entry may not make much sense, it has a good moral…I think, I’m not sure, I really have to read it again.


It’s that time of year again. No, not Thanksgiving and taxes aren’t due quite yet. It’s the month of love and soon we will be celebrating (Saint) Valentine’s Day, the day on which lovers express their love for each other by sending Valentine’s cards, presenting flowers, or offering confectionery (Wikipedia). People feel one of two emotions about Valentine’s Day. You either love it or you hate it, simple as that. I am not what you would call a romantic but I love Valentine’s Day. So for the sake of this wonderful holiday, let’s take a trip down memory lane…

Many of our first Valentine’s Day’s probably started the same. A couple weeks before V Day (I’m lazy) your teacher sends you home with a note telling your parents that on this day your entire class will be celebrating Valentine’s Day. The note usually included a list of all of the students in your class and a ‘suggestion’ to please bring a card for EVERY student in the class. You are then whisked away to the local drug store where you are faced with the difficult task of choosing between Barbie (Will you be my Prince?), Garfield, Power Rangers (Have an awesome Valentine’s Day! Pow!) and some unrecognizable character that looks like cross between the purple teletubby and Wolverine. If you were anything like me, this is how your thought process goes, “Should I choose Barbies? They’re soo pretty! But what if the boys think they’re lame and they make fun of me? But what will the other girls give? Well the Garfield ones are funny and cute, should I get those? But those have no candy and the Power Rangers come with candy. Candy’s always cool.” And so on and so forth.

Once you’ve made your decision it is now time to choose which card goes to whom. You make (sign your name) the cards for your best friends first, then you make ones for the rest of the girls in your class. Then you move onto the boys. You first choose which one will go to that special boy. It can’t be too blatant (Will you be my Prince?) but it can’t be too generic (Have a spectacular day!) because then he’ll think you don’t like him at all. It has to be just perfect. You eventually end up giving him the one with the prettiest Barbie on it although as a sacrifice it also has the most generic greeting. You then move onto the boys you don’t like. But you don’t even care about what their cards say because you sign their names and ‘accidentally’ forget to sign your name, oops.

Valentine’s Day rolls around and once you deliver all of your cards into their respective love boxes (shoe boxes the class was forced to decorate two days earlier) you quickly run back to your desk and begin to shuffle through your box trying to find that one special valentine from that special someone J. It’s a Power Rangers card (You rock my world! Pow!). OMG, it’s meant to be!!

This continues for several years. Some years you make the cards with doilies and cut out hearts, other times you just get candy valentines and write your name on the box. Eventually though this elementary (literally) celebration ends and Valentine’s Day is all of a sudden the property of the Associated Student Body. You are thus forced to show your admiration through the form of a single carnation. But now there are all sort of stigmas attached. All of a sudden, every single person in your class has got a boyfriend or girlfriend. You will be the only person not carrying an ugly, waxy, slightly wilted carnation on Valentines Day. So you team up with your other single girlfriends and swear to buy each other carnations. OMG, you smile innocently when a representative from the student body hands you a rose in fourth period English class. “I have no idea who got this for me”, you say sheepishly. You and your friends continue this little charade all throughout middle school and high school. If you were lucky when you progressed to high school your Associated Student Body progressed from carnations to roses. I remember one year I kept on badgering one of my guy friends to buy me a rose on V Day. He wouldn’t do it. I told him to at least buy his girlfriend a rose. He wouldn’t do that either, his way of sticking it to the man (ASB). Instead his girlfriend and I bought each other roses and then bought him a dozen roses which he then had to carry around for the rest of the day.

As awkward as Valentine’s Day was, I always loved it. I loved seeing all of the different types of cards in my love box, each representing a fellow student and friend. I loved waking up in the morning to find a box of chocolate and a Valentines Day card on my dining room table. And I loved receiving those carnations and roses every year, without fail, from my friends. After a couple years my girlfriends and I stopped asking each other for roses and just expected them. The roses would always come with a note, something along the lines of “Happy Valentine’s Day Karebear, I’m soo glad we’re friends! Love, Beachie.”

For many, Valentine’s Day is a day that is otherwise meaningless if it is not spent with a significant other. Those are the people who usually say they hate Valentine’s Day. For me, Valentine’s Day is a day to remind everyone in my life just how much I love them. So don’t look at Valentine’s Day as Singles Awareness Day, find someone you love and spend the day with them. Tell your friends that you love them, tell your parents how much you appreciate them, and buy yourself some chocolate because most of all you should love yourself!