Valentine’s Day…Bah, Humbug!

If you happened to read my early blog posts before, during, and after Christmas, you won’t be surprised to learn that I have a similar contempt for the red and pink high sucrose orgy known as Valentine’s Day. Forget the fact that the holiday commemorates the ghastly 270 A.D. beating and beheading of a Roman priest who defied Emperor Claudius’ decree forbidding all marriages and engagements (he thought he could get more Roman men to join his armies if they had no one to come home to), I am reluctant to participate in any holiday that is largely designed to fill the coffers of corporate America. As I said in the Valentine’s Day poem that Kendall forces me to write for her each year:

You know I hate holidays with such expectation
I’d rather go fight in a terrorist nation.
I’d love to bring you flowers any day but today
I’d buy you some candy—but aujourd’hui? No way!

Okay, so I haven’t bought Kendall flowers since the 1989 opening of a play she was starring in, but I’d buy them in theory the other 364 days of the year! I know I’m a lousy poet but at least I made the card myself and avoided Hallmark like the plague. Did you know that that there is a Hallmark Political Action Committee that almost exclusively supports right-wing Republicans? They gave a substantial chunk of change to Mr. Cupid himself, George W. Bush. No wonder his words often sound as treacly as a Hallmark card.

How do you like this sweet Valentine’s Day card I found from days gone by? Nothing says “I love you, darling” like lung cancer, emphysema, and coronary heart disease. Who can forget the terrors of the Valentine’s Days of our youth? There were no rules back then in schools that you had to bring a Valentine for all the students in the class, so Valentine’s Day was a social free-for-all that forever cemented the boundaries between the popular kids and the hopeless geeks. I can still remember my Charlie Brown-like feeling of despair when I spent hours making Nandia Black a beautiful Valentine out of painted red corrugated cardboard clumped with glitter and got nothing in return but a broken heart.

I was relieved when Leah informed me she wasn’t “doing” Valentine’s Day this year but was instead focusing on the California Missions project they were presenting today. I went to her school this morning to see the model of the mission she built with two of her classmates. The kids were very skilled at explaining the different parts of the mission and their talk had a very 2005 P.C. slant. Right up there with the methods they used to make soap and candles were facts such as “The Spanish soldiers abused the Native American women repeatedly which was very bad.” Oy, suddenly I was an apologist for the Spaniards and asked, “But surely not all of them abused women, did they?” “No, but if the other ones stayed quiet and did nothing, it was almost as bad as the abuse.” I guess their research was more extensive than my old textbooks that spoke of the “happy primitive people” who were grateful for the arrival of the white man!

Comments

[Tamar]

Oy! And I am thinking of my posting yesterday with roses and sweetness all around. I hang my head in shame because I know you are right, right, right!

And yet, we had a lovely dinner last night in Chestnut Hill and the management gave ONLY the women each a red rose. I donated mine to the bartender who worked conintuously like a maniac the whole evening - unnoticed!

[Danny]

Kendall and I are going for a special dinner this weekend and I can't wait! I am willing to set aside all my values for a nice creme brulee! Good for you for giving your rose to the bartender (why do only women get the damn flowers?).

[Lisa]

Danny, you are a splendid curmudgeon. Tamar, how appalling that in Chestnut Hill, the management gave roses only to the women! When Melissa and I celebrated Valentine's Day at the Harvard Club last year, the only queer couple there, we each received a rose with nary a blink of an eyelid. Bravo, Harvard!

(And _if_ you want to indulge on Valentine's Day, nuthin' says loving like a chocolate ganache cake from Dancing Deer Bakery!)

[david]

Danny: My wife **forbids** celebration of Valentine's Day. It's just ahead of Halloween on her list of Holidays Jew Should Have Nothing to Do With. Of course, she gets a **little** peeved if I don't acknowledge it in **some** way. But she's cute when she's mad.

[Marie]

All men are idiots and about 30% of all women are as well. Relationships for these will be successful. For the other 70% of women a labotomy is needed for any happiness with a man. As soon as she figures out that he is selfish to the core and an ignorames, her happiness is doomed.
You disagree, look at the world. Men have ruled it for the pass milenia and look at the mess. you realy want to trust your heart and affections to them?