Good Valentimes (Har Har)

Penn and I had a low-key Valentine’s Day celebration this weekend. I love Valentine’s Day because I love ALL holidays. I’m one of those people who would never dream about just ignoring a birthday, has a small collection of decorations for each holiday (and a not-so-small collection of Christmas decorations), wears green on St. Patrick’s Day and red on Valentine’s Day and black or orange on Halloween. There’s a fine line between me and the holiday sweater people, is what I’m saying. I really like any excuse to make a particular day special. For me, that’s what Valentine’s Day is: it’s an excuse to make my special once-a-year Valentine’s Day cookies and do something fun for the people I love. Which isn’t to say that I don’t love my people every other day of the year, because I do. But, honestly, Valentine’s Day Haters, what is so damn horrible about having a day in which the whole point is to think about how much you love someone and make sure that they know it? Yes, that should happen every day, but it definitely doesn’t. Just like I don’t remember to say “Thank you” to my dad every day and I don’t remember to think about Jesus’s resurrection every day and I don’t remember to be thankful for a five-day work week every day, even though I know I SHOULD think about those things and be thankful. That’s the whole point of holidays: commemoration and celebration. Nobody goes around complaining about Independence Day, saying “we appreciate America every day of the year, why should we have one dumb holiday to celebrate it?” So why the backlash against Valetine’s Day? I just don’t understand it.
I don’t even understand when single people complain about it. Sure, it reminds you that you don’t currently have a significant other, but I remember my single days very vividly (because they weren’t so long ago) and I’m pretty sure that, had I hated being single, I could have found a “Poor Me, I’m Single” reminder every single day, not just on Valentine’s Day. Also, who said Valentine’s Day is just for couples, anyway? I loved Valentine’s Day when I was single, too, just because it was a day that was slightly different. I always got candy and cards from someone, even during the years I was single (even if that someone was my mom) and there were always decorations and goofy school events like candy-grams. I just like festivals and rituals, I guess. I like things that help to mark the year, that keep it from being just one mundane day after another, that force you to pause for a minute and think about where you were at this time last year. And, yes, you can force yourself to do that, but having holidays built right into the calendar certainly helps with that self-reflection. Holidays give you a few days each year that you can grab onto to temporarily slow the passage of time (or at least get a real sense of how fast it is flying).
The thing is, Penn is a bit of a Scrooge about holidays. He firmly buys into the argument that it’s all commercial nonsense: Valentine’s Day was invented by Hallmark to sell cards and Christmas is just an excuse to bleed everyone’s wallet dry buying pointless gifts that no one really cares about, etc. I disagree completely, but I understand where he’s coming from. In the two years we’ve been together I’ve realized our families have very different attitudes about holidays. In his family in general, there is just a lot of…well, “keeping track of points” is how I’m starting to think about it. Not everyone is like this, but he feels like with some of his relatives you get certain “points” for showing up on holidays or sending birthday gifts. Alternately, you lose points by not showing up or by buying a gift from Wal-Mart when the other person bought a clearly more expensive gift from Pier One or whatever. There is definitely always a sense of obligation involved and many of the holidays seem to come with their own built-in guilt trips so, yeah, I understand why he came to dread most holidays rather than love them. The commercial aspect and the “fairness” aspect gets played up above everything else, and I can see how that would get exhausting over time (It doesn’t help, also, that his parents are divorced so even if there wasn’t the weird points-keeping thing going on there would still be the “Whose party am I going to choose” dilemma.) I hope this isn’t coming across in the wrong way, and I feel like I should point out here that I realize that when you marry a man you’re marrying his family as well and I DO fundamentally like his family. This isn’t a complaint. They are what they are, and they have certainly embraced me as a new family member and I’m embracing them, quirks and all. That doesn't mean I always get those quirks, but I'm trying. I’m lucky so far that my future in-laws have been very accepting and welcoming of me. I have fun with them, and overall they’ve made feeling like a part of the family very easily. So I hope this isn’t coming across as bashing, because that’s not how I intend it at all. I feel like I’ve probably been dealt a pretty easy hand, as far as in-laws go. But anyway, my point is, I fundamentally disagree with how many of his family members have handled holidays and the baggage that has gotten attached to them and…well, is it wrong to want to do the holiday thing MY way? I mean, it's unfair to say that my family did holidays "right" and his family did holidays "wrong" because I don't think that's true and every family is just different, but the fact remains that I love holidays and Penn is "eh" about them so I think in this case it makes more sense to celebrate the way I like to celebrate and hope that Penn eventually starts to focus more on the fun part of holidays. He doesn't have to be a borderline holiday sweater person like I am, but I'm hoping that over time he'll learn to appreciate the holidays, even the commercial parts of them. I'm hoping that I can take the stress out of holidays for him, and just make them good times to look forward to.
Case in point: Valentine’s Day at my house when I was a kid was great fun. We’d wake up in the morning and my mom would have Valentine’s Day gifts for us sitting at the breakfast table. The gifts were never anything fancy, just heart-shaped erasers and little bags of candy or maybe a stuffed animal. (For a few years my brother was confused and thought that there was some sort of mythical Valentine’s heart that delivered presents in the night like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny.) It was always exciting waking up on Valentine’s Day, and even if I didn’t have a boyfriend that year it didn’t matter because I’d gotten something special from my family. In fact, my mom still sends me a care package every Valentine’s Day. This year I got some new underwear from Victoria’s Secret, some candy, a package of homemade cookies, and a Valentine from my parents that says “No parents could ask for a better daughter than you.” And yes, I guess that’s not the norm and I’m very lucky (or spoiled, if you want to be cynical) but I just want to make sure that my family—the one Penn and I are going to create together—has the same fun holiday experiences I had and comes to enjoy holidays rather than feeling a sense of obligation and dread. I’m totally going to be that mom making heart-shaped pancakes and putting a box of conversation hearts in the lunch boxes. That’s just the kind of person I am.
And even though Penn thinks Valentine’s Day is a waste of money, he knows that I’m a holiday-lover and I appreciate it very, very much when he plays along and makes holidays special with me, so he took me ice skating on Friday night and on Sunday I made us a special Valentine’s Day lunch. I made meat sauce with pasta (not pasta with meat sauce, meat sauce with pasta. Emphasis on the meat. I’ve got this the-way-to-the-heart-is-through-the-stomach thing down!) and chocolate sundaes with raspberry sauce and homemade whipped cream. And then we used our ski passes to go skiing. See? Low-key, very inexpensive (the meal plus the ice skating was less than fifteen bucks total and the skiing was “free” since we paid for our pass months ago), we skipped the clichéd roses and jewelry but managed to have a day that felt like a holiday anyway. And we both had a good time.
There is more than enough cynicism in the world. Why buy into it all the time? Especially on holidays.