I got through another Valentine's Day and barely even knew it was February, let alone the fourteenth. If you're like me, Valentine's Day is about as meaningful today as the first one, in which a hopeless romantic was tortured and beheaded. How we got from that to heart-shaped boxes of chocolates and glamour shots is beyond me. Although I can see why the romantic man has been a rarity for centuries.
Valentine's Day isn't my favorite holiday. And while my husband does the Snoopy happy dance, I'll explain why. As a married woman, it's a pointless holiday. If there was only one day when we're expected to show how much we love our spouse, then dress shirts wouldn't get ironed very often, would they? When I was single, Valentine's Day was a 24-hour perfect storm of anticipation, anxiety and misunderstandings. And as a kid, Valentine's Day was simply a pain the butt, partly because of the monotonous signing and addressing of individual valentines to classmates, but mostly because of the boxes. My first- through fifth-grade teachers ruined the most romantic day of the year for me, by making me compete in the stupidest craft ever: The Valentine Box.
Around the first week of February, I'd start looking around the house for a Kleenex box, relying on the fact that it was cold season in hopes of getting one emptied in time to decorate it for the Valentine party at school. I'd take the empty Kleenex box to the dining room table, round up a couple of white paper lace doilies, some red construction paper, a pair of scissors and some school paste, and get busy valentining the crap out of that box.
That was me and our house. For some of my classmates it was a little bit different. Their moms got involved and their valentine boxes were multimedia works of art and a crystal ball glimpse into the future that would be Pinterest. One year Don Majors's mom had to drive his valentine box into the classroom just before the festivities began, because it wouldn't have survived a school bus ride from out in the township. Don (and presumably his mother, possibly a few aunts and even his father, but most definitely his mother) had built a valentine box around one of his toy trucks. A big one. It looked like a Barbie parade float. It was covered in red, pink and white tiny crepe paper flowers, the kind that you would twist on the tip of a pencil eraser and then glue down just so. Each paper flower was perfection, in perfectly straight rows. Obviously, he won the Valentine Box Contest that year. And his mom earned our awe and respect forever.
Every year, as I slapped paste on my red construction paper and smooshed it against the Kleenex box, I knew I wasn't going to win the Valentine Box Contest. I mean, think about it: I started with a Kleenex box only because it already had a hole in the top of it. Talk about literally not thinking outside the box, did it not occur to me to come up with a different shape and cut a dang hole in the top of that to make The Valentine Box?
But enough of that. I've gotten my share of valentines, heart-shaped boxes of chocolates, and red roses, and early on in my marriage I even got an opal ring (although that was the same time period in which my husband was spending a lot of time at The Backstage Lounge and one of the local jewelers drank with him, so who knows how much effort or money was spent on that decision; I choose to see it as a sweet expression of love, but that's me).
These days, with bachelorettehood and THANK GOD school Valentine parties behind me, I survive Valentine's Day by not having to decorate anything and when the Kleenex is gone, I can throw out the box.