So another Valentine's Day is upon us. Flowers are 50-300% more expensive. Red cards that don't exactly say what you mean are flying off the shelves at 4USD a pop. Candy, hearts, Pajama-grams, Vermont Teddy Bears, diamonds... buy, buy, buy!

I tell my wife I love her everyday and we basically don't celebrate this Holiday which is fine by both of us.

Do you celebrate this day?

Do you do anything special for or because of it?

Question for debate:
Is this holiday a marketing creation or a valid day set aside for Love?

Is this holiday a marketing creation or a valid day set aside for Love?

Bah, humbug, or whatever curse is appropriate for VD. Valentine's Day is definitely a product of marketing. It is designed to make men feel obligated to express their feelings in ways they might not be comfortable with (or fake feelings they don't have), and that spending a certain amount of money shows how much they love their significant other. It's designed to boost greeting card, chocolate, flower and jewelry sales. Seen a homemade valentine lately? I thought not.

And it's designed to make single, unattached people feel bad, but I refuse to feel bad! I fart in St. Valentine's general direction! Even when I was with someone, Valentine's Day was always an uncomfortable day; what do you give, what does it mean, what will he think, blah blah blah. Retailers just needed a profitable holiday after the Christmas orgy and the long winter sales drought.

I am so with you on this one, Daffy. I think V-Day is laaaaaaame. The only time I 'celebrated' it was when I was in elementary school and I was sort of forced into it. At the class card exchange, I made it a point to give the ugliest cards to the people I liked the least. I've always been a class act.

I don't need a prescribed holiday in order to express my love for anyone or to expect others to express it to me. In fact, if one actually needs the holiday to do this, I question the stability of their commitment. Love lasts all year if it really is love. Celebrate any other time; the restaurants will be less crowded.

I can't say it's the be-all-end-all holiday, but we celebrate it at the Hernandez house. I think it's nice to set aside a day specifically for lovers old and young.

I mean, holidays in general simply serve the purpose of relieving life monotony. They don't have to be observed if you don't want to. The list could get pretty long if we want to disparage special days...St Patrick's day? Just a day to get drunk and force yourself to eat corned beef; Anniversaries? What's the point it's just another day...Birthdays? What's up with celebrating those? Duh, you were born...you should be giving a gift to your mother rather than receiving one. And so forth...So in a nutshell, I think it's kind of cute for the kids to give out 'be mine' cards and candy at school, but it's not a super-special event for us.

I do remember our first Valentine's day fondly, though. It was the day I gave my boyfriend (now husband) a dalmation puppy. That dog saw ten moves and the birth of our kids. He lived to be 12 and died four years ago. It's been a while.

Amen. I want a dalmation! ! !
I believe that people should use holidays like this to take ONE NIGHT per year and go all out to make their spouse/significant other feel special (and/or kids too). It doesn't have to be commercial or expensive. It doesn't have to include silly candy or expensive flowers. It should include thoughtfulness and planning... dabbed with love.

This year I got the better half tickets to one of the Dallas Summer Musicals (which I have no idea why they're called summer musicals, as this one is this month). We trade off years to cook and make the night special. Because we both have hectic and stressful work lives, going out is usually hard and far less personal. This year is her year to cook (don't worry guys... I did a wonderful job last year) and hang out.

It's not a Hallmark holiday unless you make it that way. I just went to pick up a gift bag @ the grocery store down the st from the office, and there were literally a million guys wandering the aisles with a look of desperation. I kinda felt bad for them. I'd bet kind words and a great back rub would gain more traction than cheap chocolate and a funky teddy bear.

Is this holiday a marketing creation or a valid day set aside for Love?

To paraphrase the philosopher savant Forrest Gump, I think it's neither.

I think calling Valentine's Day a holiday places it on a pedestal on which it does not belong. While it has been severely marketed it is not necessarily a marketing creation. Oh you can get trapped in the marketing of Valentine's Day and get trapped into spending unwarranted sums for roses and going to places that are extremely expensive with long waits, overly frenetic and hectic environments, bad service, and an all around not good time. But then again, welcome to America. To single out Valentine's Day to expose the fact that we live in a society where consumerism often outmuscles sincerity and self-awareness is unfair. We do this on our holidays, from Christmas, Mother's Day, Easter to our big Sunday Can you say White Sale!)ad days (Labor Day, President's Day, or Columbus Day). We live in a society where we (sorry Wertz) turned some worthless central Florida swampland into an artificial paradise that is the number one tourist destination in the world. Florida's beaches are (or were) beautiful and so are its everglades, but Americans flock to Orlando to go to Wally Worlds and Corporate Restaurants and never see anything natural while we are there. Another of our popular destinations is planted in the desert a city of lights and sequins and huge hotels and larger buffet lines. We are the land of the Mall of America. Instead of immersing ourselves in the finest accomplishments of human culture over the ages to accent our days we all spend our days being bombarded by advertising for products and services. We won't read more than a book or two this year on average but we will read and see and hear enough advertising each month to stretch to a galaxy far, far away and back.

So, yes, Valentine's Day is part of the consumerism culture and it can be a totally unsentimental rip-off every year. It isn't for me. Sure I get into some trouble with my wife when I try to make her gift something less than she is expecting that year. This year she found a jewelry seventy percent off sale and found a bracelet of gold and sliver for $40 and she likes it and shows it off at work and is sweet enough to brag on me for being so thoughtful. A few years ago I wrote her a poem (I do write poetry but tend to keep it to myself and do not usually do something like that) and printed it on a nice piece of stationary. She framed it (to me embarrassment at times) and has is on display near our wedding picture. Dismissing Valentine's Day for being too commercial is like following the ideals of Thoreau's Walden one day a year. It misses the point that we are all trapped in a factory produced box called consumerism that it takes daily work to see past and remember what of life is "real" to you.

I like special days because they allow you to make something special out of them. Beyond consumerism, which I think is an American antidote for modern life (not my idea, I just adhere to it) we as humans have an annoying characteristic of tending to not recognize the things that are most precious to us. The cliche here is that we take the things in our lives that are the best part of our lives for granted. One's significant other, the one that sees our worst parts and deals with our daily and endless annoyances and pretends that they shine like glitter and smell like perfume, is the most unappreciated individual in the world often. I remember fixating for days and weeks on girls or young women that I had to go out with. I would plot and dwell and I would look at guys that had similar beauties inside and out as mates and see them treat them like something ordinary and wonder how one ever could get to that point.

I have a theory that life changes in two weeks. Once something is part of your life for more than two weeks it has become a part of it and feels normal. (Perhaps this is why vacations longer than two weeks might be dangerous) And it takes probably about this two weeks going from worshipping an exotic creature to having a girlfriend that has flaws and tends to complain a lot.

Then get married, take on a mortgage or two, have some kids, have lives that speed by doing tasks that help you get through the day or the week, fight over the bills on a weekly basis as you try to help secure the best environment and future for your children that your meager income and limited time can allow, and make small comments and pass each other like two zombie like ships in the night and even while spending every night in the same bed, sometimes going weeks without really ever touching. In daily life the interactions of life create the inadvertent comment, the dumping off responsibilities on the other, the minor marital spat and life can be a death of a thousand cuts.

The love is there all along, but a day that gives a couple like this the custom to say, today is our day and we are going to use it can be extremely helpful and letting that couple get a recharge and remember the good things a little better.

I don;t always get Valentine's Day right, in part because it can be hectic and the paths are often either too worn or over-crowded. This year, it looked like we were not going to do that much. I had bought her a bracelet, she bought me a box of chocolates with corny boxers and delicious Dove's chocolate truffles. We had worked hard getting the older kids ready for their elementary school Valentine's day parties. I even used their extras and gave a few goofy valentine's day gestures out to my high school students during the day. (And, to get a laugh, a male student of mine gave me one of those chocolate roses a the end of a project that he was about to get a major grade on)

Near the end of the day, my wife told me that she thought we could go out and that her brother would watch the triple pack of fun that is our children. As always I was tired and not certain I wanted to face anything in our busy suburban mini-mall land of a town during Valentine's Day. She suggested we could start early. We left at four and went to an Italian restaurant that we had never been to before. We bought a bottle of Chianti and sipped it slowly and nibbled on two plates of dinner as the restaurant filled up and overflowed with people waiting for the table. We got "the whole nine yards" and while we weren't camping at our table, we were in no rush to leave. We finished with a huge piece of triple chocolate something cake and an express and a bailey's and coffee. When we left I heard one of the oddest hostess lines I have ever heard. A hostess was telling a new arrival around 6:20 that the wait was 110 minutes. The woman hearing this protested on logical grounds that nobody talks like that. Nobody says 110 minutes. Had we left 30 minutes later that afternoon our V-Day would have been in the trenches waiting with the Hoi Polloi.

The meal was perfectly timed and surprisingly inexpensive and we left to go stroll around Border's for a few moments before going to a movie. We almost never go to movies and we almost didn;t in this case as we had movies at home (3 not very appropriate Valentine's Day movies that had come in from netflix, Clerks II, Fly Boys, and Flags of Our Fathers) My wife was good enough to let me provide the choice of movies at our local ten thousand movie screens o rama and I picked two movies I thought would be great theater experiences (again we almost never go out) They were a little selfish, one was Letters From Iwo Jima which I can;t wait to see and really want to see in a theater, the other was Pan's Labarynth which is a Spanish film using the literary genre of magical realms (think Like Water for Chocolate if you've heard of it) I would have offered another option if I had remembered that Pan's was a Spanish language film.

We went to see Pan's Labarynth (I can't spell Labyrinth) and we enjoyed it. I enjoyed it a little more than her. I thought it was a magical film with a wonderful story and amazing relatively low budget visual effects and cinematography. My wife liked it as well. We got home before 9:30 and our kids had hand-crafted odes of their love to us. Our daughter who is in second grade composed an essay that was so sweet and amusing we dug into those baby books we all buy and at least in my house rarely get used and become more evidence that the child was not held in a very special light because of the paucity of items that have been placed in all of the prompting areas.

The handmade Valentine's and notes were more than special to us and my wife took ten or fifteen minutes to go through the memories that she was adding to in our daughter's book. We then piled into bed just short of ten PM, exhausted and happy as pie. We may have aspired to a little extra adult time but after minor snuggling we were deep in REM sleep.

We woke up refreshed, recharged and humming songs as we srtarted another day just before 5 AM and raced about our morning responsibilities that come with getting three kids and two adults out of bed.

In short, I had a great Valentine's Day and days like this help us pay enough attention to ourselves to remember how much we care about each other and how lucky we are. If we ever go too long between moments like this, we might lose the love that is the bedrock of our lives. For me a commercial day to help prompt me to show that I do not take my wife for granted, especially, if I have been doing it, is more than worth the cost of being expected to do something for my wife at the behest of Hallmark and Corporate America.

Question for debate:
Is this holiday a marketing creation or a valid day set aside for Love?


Yes.

In other words, it is whatever you want to make of it. For some people, it is a cruel reminder of their loneliness. For others, it is a day of joy and celebration. For some, it is crass commercialization of human emotion. For others, it is a time to rekindle those emotions.

All of these people are right.

Personally, I don't care much for any holidays at all, my feelings for them ranging from mildly positive (Hallowe'en) to strongly negative (Christmas.) That's just me, and you are certainly free to feel about holidays as you like. We generally don't do anything for Valentine's Day. There are some exceptions, like when our favorite pizza place offers heart-shaped pizzas, or a fancy candy store offers beautiful strawberries in superb white chocolate. But that's just gluttony, and has nothing to do with hearts and flowers.

This year we actually went out on Valentine's Day for dinner, but that was because our local English tearoom was offering an evening meal, which they rarely do, and they had a vegetarian option. It was just a nice meal, with nothing related to the holiday going on, except for the fact that I got a free rose.

I have one gentleman friend who sends me cards for Valentine's Day, because he is a very nice person who enjoys playing the role of Knight in Shining Armor in the service of his Lady. This is a pleasant game, but he knows that I am much older than he is and that I have been married for many years.

The thing that makes me scratch my head a little bit about Valentine's Day is the fact that it is supposed to be dedicated to romantic love, and yet there is so much of it marketed to small children. At the risk of sounding like a spoilsport, it just seems odd to me that there should be Valentine's Day cards designed to be given from parents and grandparents to children, and vice versa. It seems like giving a Father's Day card to a childless woman. But to each her own.

Hey, consumer spending represents 70%+ of the US economy so spend away! I bought Mrs. Helmet a dozen red roses with all the trimmings and had them delivered to her work. She got the pleasure of receiving the nice gift and the added pleasure being able to enjoy the jealousy of her female co-workers who's lame husband/boyfriends didn't have the decency to do the same.

And I received the pleasure of.... uh never mind. There is no need to go into that.

All holiday are "marketing creations". Do you think that Christmas is really about Christianity these days? Ho, ho, ho is more like it.

Live it up and love while you can.

Valentines day is upon us again.

On the 14th I plan to send my friend Rhona, who hs retired to her native Ireland, a VD greeting.