The anti-Valentine's Day stuff seems to be lingering around Facebook this year. You've seen the self-righteousness, I am sure:
"I don't need to be told to tell my husband I love him."
"It's just a Hallmark holiday."
"What, don't you love your wife the rest of the year?"
"It's a conspiracy to get you to buy jewelry!"
And that's not touching the fuss over single people and domestic violence.
Really, folks need to get over it. I'll agree that the expansion of the holiday is silly. I do not, for the record, feel compelled to buy my children stuff for the holiday, or any other relatives. I don't feel compelled to have my kids make valentines for one another. (I do, however, insist that they write out cards for everyone in the class, since there is still such an exchange at school & I used to be the kid who got two cards out of a class of 30.)
But...and this is a big but...
It's hardly the only day we celebrate something we should be doing all year long. No one rejects Mother's Day as a Hallmark holiday (even though the woman responsible for it grew aggrieved over the commercialization in her latter years), or Father's Day because we should appreciate our dads year-round. No one refuses to celebrate birthdays because we shouldn't need a day to tell our kids how great they are. No one rejects Veterans' Day, or Memorial Day, or Independence Day, or Thanksgiving, or Christmas, or Easter, or, hell Earth Day.
But Valentine's Day gets shit on.
Listen, the demands this holiday places on you are make-believe. There may be a commercial expectation that you go overboard for Valentine's Day...but the same thing exists for birthdays, anniversaries, and Christmas. You don't have to do anything. The fiance of a message board compatriot showered her with gifts every day for the week up to & including the holiday. The husband of another got her flowers and a stuffed animal and chocolates. Quite a few had hot, sweaty sex.
Erik and I? We drank beer and watched a Mel Brooks film...which is pretty much exactly what we did a week ago, only last night there were no chocolate covered strawberries. (There were miniature Hershey's candy bars, though.)
Any of these things is acceptable. So is absolutely nothing.
The other irksome thing? "I don't need just one day to tell me to be romantic to my husband" implies that the rest of us do. I dunno, maybe gunbloggers are just unusually romantic, but I haven't seen any signs that folks wait around for that one day to celebrate the love they have for their spouse.
5 comments:
+1
Well said!
Actually, plenty of people "reject" or more accurately, ignore Mother's Day as a Hallmark Holiday. No one in my family (both sides: my dad's branch and mom's branch) has ever bothered paying any attention to it. Or Father's Day, either.
I suppose I really wasn't being clear, then. I am well aware that there are folks who avoid all of those holidays and others as made up...but I haven't encountered one single person making a point of it. They just ignore it and go on about their day (much as I do with, say, Grandparents' Day). Valentine's Day is the only holiday I can think of that we celebrate as a nation that folks make a point of publicly declaring their opposition to, lacking a religious reason for doing so.
Ooo, which Mel Brooks movie did y'all watch? I popped Blazing Saddles in the other day, tho my wife can't stand it.
I gotta say, while I think that Hallmark is doing their best to profit from the holiday, the day is still easily enough "celebrated" in humble fashion like I did: got a card for the wife, made dinner at home. (Tho we did a bigger dinner-out on Saturday at Joe's Crab Shack, for Valentine's/our anniversary, which was actually today.)
Last night was Robin Hood: Men in Tights; last week was Young Frankenstein. Blazing Saddles is up next; it was a near thing between that & the one we watched. Poor Erik hasn't seen any of these films, even on TV!
Post a Comment