Valentine's Day blues

Tuesday is Valentine’s Day. Whoopie. I used to really dread this holiday spawned from the evil minds of greeting card companies. (I think the flower wholesalers are in on it, too. Who else would schedule a flower-based holiday in the dead of winter when prices are at their peak?)

According to the card mafia, you’re never too young to celebrate the day of love. We started exchanging those little paper cards with cartoons on them in kindergarten. The good moms put lollipops with their kids’ Valentines. At that age, the teacher handed out a list, and you gave one to everybody in the class. Those were the days because you knew you weren’t going to be left out. You could always tell which were from girls and which were from boys. The writing was all just scribbles, but the girls always bought cute cards with flowers and puppies. The boys featured trucks and professional wrestlers. But it really didn’t matter what was on the card anyway. They were all destined for the garbage cans in a few weeks. Unless you had a scrapbooking mom, who also tended to be a candy mom.

In middle school, the Valentine tradition dramatically changed for the worse. The little cartoon Valentines become for friends only, and members of the opposite sex come into play. Valentine’s Day suddenly goes from a game everyone can play to something exclusive.

It only got worse in high school. On Valentine’s Day our cafeteria would become flower central as each girl secretly hoped her bouquet was the biggest. In order to cushion the blow to us single people, some moms (usually the ones that put suckers in the Valentines then scrapbooked them in elementary school) would send their kids flowers. Some got both: a single flower from the parents, then some arrangement too elaborate for high school love from a sweetheart.

Then there’s college, and the holiday begins to ease a bit. The first (and only) time I ever got flowers on Valentine’s Day was my freshman year of college. That was because my roommate and I worked on each other’s boyfriends to guilt them into buying us flowers. Otherwise, they would have been too cheap to spend a few bucks on the holiday. Slightly pathetic, but it worked.

As I got older, everything sort of evened out. Now, I know very few people who get flowers on Valentine’s Day, even the ones who are married or have boyfriends. Especially the married ones. Nate is not the most romantic type, so I expect the same from him this year as the last: nothing. Well, not exactly nothing. I got a prime rib dinner Sunday night at a very nice place last year. For a pregnant woman, that was just as good as flowers and chocolate. Maybe better.

But this year, with Valentine’s Day on a Tuesday, we won’t have time to go out. Therefore, something with petals and stems would be nice instead. But I’m not holding my breath.