Yesterday was Valentine’s Day; one of the biggest rip-offs in the year. When I was in university (in the US), I found out that they have a second similar day, known as Sweetest’s Day. In the States, they get ripped off twice!
This year, Dena and I decided that most Valentine’s Day stuff was poinltess commercial shlock that we didn’t want any part of. Hallmark and local florists didn’t make any money from us. Instead, we did unconventional things. Dena cleaned out my closest because she felt it was “too crowded in there”. We watched almost a weeks worth of episodes of Conan O’Brien that we taped at night when he did his show from the Elgin Theatre in Toronto last week. I then cooked a sumptuous meal for Dena; Beef Stroganoff for the entree, Champagne to drink and mini cheesecakes with strawberries for dessert. The fact that I cooked is unconventional because Dena rarely allows me in the kitchen 😉 I capped the night off by watching My Bloody Valentine (the movie and not the band, sadly) on Scream. Of course, Dena being the way she is with horror films, I was watching by my lonesome.
I was reminded of a childhood memory, too. I remember at St. Paul, we had a Valentine exchange. All of the elementary schools in Timmins did that and probably every elementary school in North America (and beyond?) did the same. The day before Valentine’s Day, the teacher would give us a list of names of the kids in our class for us to take home to our parents. My mom would go through the list while I personalized a cheesy little Valentine card for each kid in my class. On Valentine’s day in school, we would decorate paper bags, tape them to our desks. Then we went around the class and dropped our Valentine cards into everyone’s little paper bags. Then we read them. Then that was it. Looking back on that, I realize that the whole elementary school Valentine card exchange was extremely lame. Why would eight year-olds want to read “Be mine” on a card from a classmate? Eight years old! This was probably entertainment for the teacher.
