a little manifesto about roses, teddies, and Hallmark

Paige's Valentines for school this year (carefully edited for the U-6 crowd, mind you.)
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Seeing the craft blogs explode with Valentine's crap in the last week or so reminds me to post an annual rant about love and commercialism. Ha ha! You thought I was going to get all smarmy and cutesy on you.

I'm not a fan of Valentine's Day. Haven't been for quite a while. Here's why:
1) I seemed to never have a boyfriend/crush/romantic interest on Valentine's Day through most of my formative years. It was always such a crushing disappointment. Especially for a 10-year-old who still thought popular approval was a prerequisite to living a complete and balanced existence.
2) Once I *did* land a romantic interest of some sort, I was in high school. Meaning, I was living with my parents. Who own a floral shop. Let me tell you: I love flowers. There is something so peaceful about working with cut flowers and turning something with so much natural beauty to begin with into an artwork (like wedding flowers, or a beautiful vase of wildflowers from the farmer's market, or the like.) So, I dig on flowers. But after spending 5 days straight stripping the thorns of countless overpriced, immature roses which didn't open right and wilted quickly and lacked fragrance because of the way in which they were raised... my hands were raw. My feet hurt from standing. And I didn't want to talk with anyone, because I had just spent nearly a week taking orders from men who bought 2 dozen roses for the wife I knew they cheated on the rest of the year (because the rest of the year, these same guys rolled into our flower shop at 9AM Sunday morning to buy flowers for the missus after being out drinking all night, often with lipstick on their collar and cheap perfume intermingled with stale cigarettes on their jeans and jackets.) While in high school, Valentine's Day only meant dollar signs to my family. When the sun went down on February 14th, we all ordered pizza and collapsed in the TV room. Romance, thy name is floral goods.
3) So, I went away to college and promptly landed a job in retail. More Valentine's commercialism. For a month, we did nothing but pick up polyester-silk nighties from the floors at night. They came on those ridiculous padded hangers which, covered in cheap polyester silk, wouldn't hold a static charge, much less a negligee made primarily of a substance which seemed like a cross between silicone and woven evil. The store was flooded with crap... tiny bears embracing heart-shaped bottles of hot pepper oil, cheap earrings bespeckled with shitty red rhinestones, grandma-pins with snuggling white walruses. The strange part? That crap flew off the shelves, faster than the demonically-possessed chipmunk-reciting Rudolphs we had for Christmas that year. I was perplexed. No one is ever going to use that heart-shaped bottle of hot pepper oil to cook anything. It will gather dust in the kitchen until there is a nasty breakup, at which time it will be a) shoved into a box in the inevitable "here-have-all-your-shit-back-I-hate-you" scene; b) thrown at someone's person during the breakup fight; or c) tossed in the garbage. or lake. or river. or overpass, in the "this is how I get closure" scene.
4) I don't understand why, generally speaking, we as a culture insist on letting Hallmark express how we feel. Don't get me wrong; I love giving cards. I enjoy stationery and I love it as an artform. But I almost never give a store-bought, commercially-manufactured card. Because local artisans do a great job of getting their handmade cards on the market. And if I do give a card which is commercially made, it's almost always a blank card. This way, I can express what I feel, and not what some amphetamine-laced writer locked away in a design studio in Kansas thinks I might feel On This Very Special Valentine's Day, about My One True Love. Bah. (Don't get me started on why I usually make my own cards, when it's important, like for Christmas or Paige's birthday invitations or the like...)

The bottom line: showing someone how much you care about them isn't about a price tag. It isn't about roses that cost too much and aren't sustainably and lovingly harvested. It isn't about cheap retail shit which has no purpose. It's not even about expensive retail shit that does have a purpose. And it is most certainly isn't something that someone else can sum up for me. Moreover, it isn't about a single day. St. Valentine's Day commemorates all kinds of different crap... from Catholic martyrs to pagan fertility rituals. But industry has bastardized its meaning to be "The ONE Day You Must Tell Someone You Adore Them."
Meh. If you like someone, shouldn't you be showing them? Telling them with your actions? And doing it on a regular basis? Like, daily? I don't know, it's like... your review at work should never be a surprise, right? If you are doing well, or doing not-so-well, your boss (the person with whom you have the closest relationship, figuratively speaking, anyway) should be talking with you about it. You should have a working relationship that doesn't include any big surprises. Same with Valentine's Day. Why all the pressure? If you havea good relationship, shouldn't you already know where you stand?
I think it is of utmost importance the people you care about know how you feel. And I also think that when we care about others, we should express it... in our actions, in our deeds, in our words. But why spend just one day conforming to what the greeting card industry says you should do to express your love?

I guess that's my challenge, to myself and to the people I love: find a way to demonstrate your love daily. It doesn't have to be big, and it doesn't even have to be flowery words (in fact, if you read this blog you know I'm way more conversational than flowery-wordy...) The cliche actions speak louder than words is a cliche for a reason: it's true. I won't buy flowers or a cheesy card for anyone this year. But I will take it on myself to make sure the people I love know it, because they see it in how I live my life with them.