Welcome to February. The month that practically has hearts floating around its own pretentiousness. Why might this be? Perhaps I’m speaking about February’s very own exploited holiday? Yep.
Valentine’s Day.
Frankly, it’s the holiday that gets too much attention from couples and chocolate companies. What is the whole point of the day? In kindergarten, we learned that it was about getting people to like you by bringing in the 3D cards for everyone. Middle school taught us that Valentine’s Day meant sliding a secret admirer note into the vents of your crush’s locker, only to forget about them by the next week. By high school, we were too cool for the other gender, so we learned to throw our very own singles night, complete with a box of chocolates for each of us. But at what point did Valentine’s Day become so cliché? Better yet, why on Earth do we even call it a holiday?
Isn’t it a bit odd that we grow up celebrating a holiday, without really even knowing its meaning? It’s very likely that only a handful of us know why or how Valentine’s Day even came about, which is ironic considering the holiday was so easily commercialized that even I now fall asleep seeing visions of red and pink throughout the month of February. To get right to the point, we celebrate Valentine’s Day to commemorate St. Valentine, a Roman Catholic saint who performed marriages in secret, which ended up getting him killed, as the Emperor didn’t much like that his soldiers could be focused on something other than protecting the divinity that is Rome. Classic Roman emperor. This all happened around 270 A.D. Valentine was quickly commemorated with his own day, that, strangely enough, didn’t become lovey-dovey at all until the Middle Ages. Beyond that, written Valentines didn’t appear until the 1400s, when people used the holiday to write letters of love to their friends and family. Printed cards, however, quickly began to dominate the valentine market in the early 1900s. Thank you Johannes Gutenberg for the printing press that makes commercialization so easy at such a young age. At least it took 400 years for people to develop it into a sentiment stamper.
So back to modern day.
I don’t love Valentine’s Day. I don’t love the candy, or the stuffed animals, or the overpriced flowers. I don’t love what Valentine’s Day is — what it’s become. We abuse it, and we almost always have. Heck, historians believe that Christians set a mid-February date to help evangelize a pagan feast that occurred around the same time. St. Valentine didn’t need a day to be chosen out of spite or an attempt to round up more church-goers. He was someone who loved love, and that’s what Valentine’s Day should be about — loving love. I wish that people would spend the day loving their neighbors, their friends, and their families, in addition to their significant other. I love love. It’s as simple as that.
This Valentine’s Day, don't embrace the cheesy, factory-made “representations of love.” Just be a shining example of love to everyone you meet. Be your own Hallmark card. Write letters to people that you know, and even people that you don’t. Many nursing homes accept valentines for their residents, which is really something that everyone should contribute to. Don’t let this holiday be run by promotions of chocolate, lingerie, and pretty red bows — that’s not at all what it is meant to be. On the other hand, don’t contribute to the population of singles that complains about being single on Valentine’s Day, because that’s not what it’s about either. Valentine’s Day is the Thanksgiving of love. Show your true love for those around you, and teach mega-companies that love cannot be commercialized. I don’t love Valentine’s Day. I do, however, love what it could be.
