V-Day Naysayers: Out of Love for all the Wrong Reasons
By Loren Olson ‘08
News Staff Reporter
My hometown is proudly provincial, but we do harbor our share of weirdoes. Take my neighbor for instance. Though a respected doctor, he blasts squirrels off of peanut brittle bait from a window in his ‘Oswald room.’ (A box in our attic marked “X-tra Gifts” discretely contains the skins of his victims.) Yet even Mr. Oswald is inspired once a year to join our town’s ranks in one of our silly Middlebury rituals. Every February, in a rare show of conformity to our town’s code of competitive normalcy, my neighbor joins us in joyous celebration of Valentine’s Day.
On any given day in mid-January, drive by Middlebury and you’ll probably pass at least one grown man puttering about his yard, inflatable candy hearts in tow. With a surprising amount of unabashedness, he purposefully taps in the stakes for SUV-sized declarations of “Be mine.”
Not surprisingly, many of our neighbors do not share our town’s borderline-religious Valentines Day fervor. While I certainly don’t disagree with their dislike of the holiday, I do find fault with their reasoning.
On a recent trip to the post office, I overheard one woman indignantly comment that Valentine’s Day wasn’t even a real holiday—as if. The poor philistine clearly had little command of her basic third-century Roman history.
In defiance of Emperor Claudius II’s decree to keep soldiers single—and therefore more fighting fit—a priest named (and this is not a coincidence) Valentine continued to perform marriages in secret. Valentine wrote the very first valentine to his jailer’s daughter while serving time, before his card-writing days were cut short when Claudius II had him murdered—I mean martyred. Further cause for celebration derives from the christianization of the Lupercalia festival, a pagan fertility ritual involved “gently slapping” women and crops with strips of sacrificial animals. Afterwards, the romantically unattached celebrants chucked their names into a cauldron from which yearlong pairings would be drawn. Pope Gelasius decided to combine the excessive festival with our favorite martyr’s death day—February 14th. As vacuous as Valentine’s Day celebrations may appear, there is a lot of history behind the card swapping and candy gorging.
But apparently history just isn’t good enough for our nation’s aestheticians. They take issue with the holiday’s color scheme and garish heart decals. Walking into a store is often compared to being frontally assaulted by a barrage of white, pink and red projectiles. Quite unfortunately for these naysayers, the truth is there are many, many ugly things in this world--so suck it up. You’ve got to pick your battles wisely, and I’m afraid that challenging humans’ entrepreneurial nature—much less sue profiteers for their bad taste in colors—is more than you can chew. As annoying as gaudy decorations and ear-wrenching songs on the radio may be, they are certainly not grounds to call off a very-celebrated holiday.
There are also those poets who will tell you—at absolutely no charge—that the entire holiday is just a superficial sham. In fact, it might be a Hallmark conspiracy to get you to spend your hard-earned Hamiltons on stale chocolate and even staler words. I hate to shine the harsh light of truth into their cozy self-righteousness, but there is actually a reason that heaps of stuffed animals and balloons are clogging store aisles—people are buying them.The products could not exist without widespread consumer support. Before your next attempt to win your sweetie’s heart, I suggest you check out exactly how much it will cost to buy out his or her heart this February fourteenth. Perhaps Valentine’s Day isn’t blessed with profundity, but have the expenditures of the majority ever indicated a distaste for the holiday’s superficial image? No.
What with all the mirrors, perfume, and crepe paper, these critics of Valentine’s Day get tangled up before they’ve even sorted out the heart of the issue. And this heart is neither frilly, marshmallow-filled, nor buy-one-get-one-half-off. So while you’re hanging upside down from the pink and white lights, listen carefully: Valentine’s Day is not profound, but it is profoundly hypocritical. Purportedly the day is a celebration of love in its many forms, from fertility to a caged priest writing love letters to his beloved jailer’s daughter. However, because the holiday super-sensitizes us to romance, it forces those of us who have been less lucky in games of the heart to think about exactly what we’re missing out on—and despise that thing even more. Suddenly, there are just as many people spurning everlasting love as there are celebrating it. The poets are missing the point. A day in which a blessed few sigh with love while the majority sighs with jealousy and self-pity is too much like everyday life to be a holiday. It’s even enough to make you wish Lee Harvey took pot shots at those monstrous “Be Mine’s.”
