Opinion- Valentine's Day is my Favorite Holiday, and it Should be Yours Too

Valentine’s Day is the perfect holiday. Its main appeal is scrapbooking, bad puns, and poems. The color scheme is fabulous. There’s no mandatory family fun and there’s flowers everywhere. If I were an alien, it would probably seem really weird. “Okay so it’s named after a saint but it’s really just an excuse to eat a lot of chocolate?” 

Like Christmas and Easter, St. Valentine’s day emerged as a blend of Roman, pagan and Christian traditions. In this case, Valentine’s lands around the festival of Lupercalia. This brings us to February 14th. The middle of February, aka peak burnout season, is the perfect time for some festive spirit. 

Unlike Halloween where your outfit has to be really superb or St. Patrick’s day where you’re threatened with violence for not participating, Valentine’s is pretty low stakes. If you forget to wear a cute red sweater no one is going to come at you with the pitchforks. You get as much out of the day as you put in. 

Next, I’m gonna rebut some of the most common gripes people have with Valentine’s. 

To address the consumerism claims: sure. As you may have heard during the Eco Fun Fact of the Week, farmed flowers bought during Valentine’s are responsible for significant greenhouse gas emissions. This is fair; I don’t have anything good to say about that. Valentine’s Day is also painted as an opportunity for corporate greed to insidiously infiltrate your shopping cart. I understand this grievance, but you don’t need to buy your loved ones a piece of plastic every year to tell them that you love them. This problem is also not unique to Valentines. I still feel hollow inside when I see the Christmas section set up in September. 

To the single cynics, you need to liven up. I wrote this poem to my best friend who unfortunately has a boyfriend this year.

Roses are Red

Sunflowers are chromate 

You may not be my Valentine,

But I think you’re my soulmate 

Even though my former valentine of around three years wasn’t available, I still got to practice my poetry and have a little goof. My outfit was also very on theme. 

If seeing other people being happy this year made you sad, maybe you should have a moment of self reflection. Perhaps radical acceptance is in your future. You shouldn’t let things outside of your control stop you from having a great time. From this day forward you should take every Valentine’s Day in stride and look around at how great life can be when you have some raspberry chocolates. 

Source:

https://www.npr.org/2011/02/14/133693152/the-dark-origins-of-valentines-day