Valentine's Day and Other Holidays I Wish Didn't Exist

When I was growing up in the ‘60s and ‘70s, I looked forward to Valentine’s Day with great anticipation and excitement. I would spend days decorating my Valentine’s mailbox for school: an empty cereal box that I covered with white lacey doilies and hearts cut out of construction paper.  I dreamed it would be full of little cards in little envelopes from my friends, sometimes with a conversation heart or two inside, maybe a Hershey’s Kiss taped to the outside. 

I decorated cards and envelopes for all my friends, including boys that I never spoke to but admired from across the room. We didn't have Care Bears or Smurfs or even Peanuts commercially produced and perforated cards. We pasted them together ourselves out of paper and decorated them with stickers and markers and crayons. In the old days, we weren’t required to give a Valentine to every student in the class, but I did anyway. A room mother would come in and we would play a game and eat a cupcake then walk around the room depositing the treasured envelopes in the other decorated boxes. At the end of the day, we took our own mailbox home to open.

After school I would take my box to my room and close the door. I would sit on the bed, nervously tearing apart my creation hoping to find it full of Valentines - maybe even one from one of the boys who maybe was admiring me as much as I was admiring him. I hoped.

Every year I hoped for the box to be full, and every year I opened it to find five or six cards from my friends: Tammy, Susie, Becky, Diane, Grace, and the only girl more unpopular than me, Laura. I imagined other girls in my class opening their boxes, full to the brim with twenty or more cards. They’d have cards from the boys. They’d have cards from everyone. Hell, I'll bet the teachers even gave them cards. They probably got more cards on their way home from kids who weren't in our classroom.

I was happy in high school when the practice of passing out Valentines was frowned on because it wasn’t cool anymore. Valentine’s Day was just another day in high school, but I knew the popular girls were still probably getting cards and flowers from their boyfriends. At least I didn’t have to witness it.

When I grew up and had my own boyfriends and eventually husbands, I held out hope for a Valentine’s Day that would live up to my advertising-enhanced imagination. I’d hope until the end of the day when I’d present my boyfriend or husband with a card and a gift and he would say something like “Oh. Thanks. I was going to get you a card or something, but I didn’t have time.”  

It was same with any holiday that requires some manner of gift-giving. Holidays are marketing tools. They’re good for the economy, so we all are benefitting in a way, I suppose.

These days I still dread the holidays but no longer because of my own expectations, but for those of my children. I know how holidays play out in their imaginations and I know that at some point they’ll be disappointed too, so I try and teach them what I’ve learned.

And what I’ve learned is that I get gifts every day and I don’t need a holiday to tell me I’m loved. I know it already. Sometimes it takes keen eyes to see them, but those gifts are there every day and those are the ones that matter.