bah, Humbug

Valentines Day.  Please.  Has a holiday ever been a bigger pain in the butt?  Now don't get your knickers in a twist.  I swear, you get less negative reaction for saying "I hate Christmas."  or "I hate puppies."  People can at least see your reasoning there--Too commercial, too religious, too likely to piddle on the rug.  But if you don't like Valentine's Day?  Oh, well, clearly your heart was broken, nobody gives you candy, you're some kind of unredeemed grump (okay, that part's kinda true).

In college, my friends and I started Students Against Stupid Holidays.  The only thing we did was dress in black on Valentines day and wear a button with a heart in a red cross-out circle with the initials S.A.S.H. on it.  It made people LIVID.  Now, our school was heavily "greek"--a majority of students were in a sorority or fraternity.  We weren't.  The sororities took Valentines Day as a Sacred Holiday.  There was much pink and red and white, many flowers, much, much construction paper.  Like roaming packs of preschool teachers on hormone overload.  Of course, this was many (many) years ago and now I remember them all as looking and acting like the 09er cheerleaders on Veronica Mars, but I'm pretty certain I'm not far off.  They'd come up to where we were sitting in the dining hall and tell us we were poor sports.  Tell us we were just bitter. (Of COURSE we were bitter, Reagan was president [see, I told you it was a long time ago].)

Later, in grad school, a couple of us half-assedly wore our G.A.S.H. badges.  Grad school beats the cheerleader right out of you, so most people were with us, if they could even focus to see what we were up to.  And then, blessedly, I passed into the more-or-less grown up world, only associating with other people who really didn't care.
Then I had kids.  And I am SO gonna make my M.A.S.H. badge as soon as I clear away all the crap from slapping valentines together. 

The Tyranny of the Heart isn't as bad at my kids' school, thank heavens.  IF you bring cards, you must bring them for all, and you aren't required to bring them at all.  No party.  No cupcakes.  About 1/3 of the valentines are homemade.  It's so hard to find them in stores w/o licensed characters on them.  What happened to the puns?  Where is "I choo-choo-choooose you!"  and "Bee Mine"?  I have a collection of vintage valentines (AhHA!  you cry, SEE, she harbors a secret love of the holiday!!  But no, I have a collection of vintage cards of all sorts. Even communion cards, which does not make me a closet Catholic) and they're corny enough to make you squirm, which redeems them somewhat.  My kids aren't really into the cards.  They printed some out on the computer.  Ben used Star WArs valentines from a SomethingAwful.com photoshopping contest.  I, um, had to disallow a few of them.  But they're really funny.  Julianna got some wizardy Hair-E PotR things.  Mostly, they just want to be sure I remember that I HAVE to buy them candy today.  They just want me to stop at the corner store and let them pick something out. The Valentines Day shake-down.

So perhaps you will spend your stupid holiday dressed in red, reeking of roses, eating cheap chocolate from CVS, but I shall watch my new dog try to mate with the rocking horse.  And what is more romantic than unrequited love?