Yearly Stupid Holiday Rant
Today is St. Valentine's Day.
This is such an amazingly, stupidly, commercial holiday.
If you want to show someone you love them, then you do it every day. All-year round. You don't wait until the fourteenth of the second month of the year to finally get off your arse and show them that you care, and you can't make up for a years worth of neglect in a single day, with a single romantic gesture.
The worse part is, enough people out there do think that one nice gesture today will 'make things better' or 'show them that I care' that there is such peer pressure building up expectations that if you don't do something special, because heaven forbid you actually do regularly show that you care, you'll get smacked around for being thoughtless or uncaring.
I dare someone to get historical with their holidays and celebrate the Roman holiday of Lupercalia (the festival of Lupercus) tomorrow (the 15th) instead.
posted by Hythian at 1:01:00 am
6 Comments:
Where, as far as I know, all actual links to a real 'St. Valentine' and Feb. 14 are entirely apocryphal, it is (I think) the end of the Greek month of Gemelion.
Gemelion ran from what would be about mid-January to mid-February and I think had a celebration of Zeus and Hera's marriage involved in there somewhere. So that would pre-date even the Roman holiday, though the Roman one sounds more amusing.
(Gemelion is really only an Athenian month on their 'Attic' calendar, since no one really shared a common calendar back then. And it was only on their lunisolar calendar, not their decimal calendar or their sidereal ones. But still an amusing factoid. (I think I spelled 'Gemelion' right...))
Tue Feb 14, 01:35:00 am GMT-8
Today is Chocolates Day! A day where one can toss away diets and nutritional programs and enjoy fine foods for the hell of it.
Just like St. Patricks is just an excuse to get drunk!
Tue Feb 14, 07:00:00 am GMT-8
If someone chooses this day (or any particular day) as *the* day to make up for being neglectful and surly the rest of the year, yeah, it's stupid.
If this day is a pretty annual bow on the romantic package of a relationship -- that can be kinda keen.
Tue Feb 14, 09:16:00 am GMT-8
If this day is a pretty annual bow on the romantic package of a relationship...
This is a much better way of thinking about it, I do have to aggree. But why today? Or why just today?
To put it another way, why treat a relationship like a sheep where you go out and sheer it once a year instead of treating it like a flower where you water it regularly and make sure it stays in the sunlight and doesn't get caught out in the cold or the wind.
*sighs* I know I am not communicating my thoughts clearly when my metaphors get that weird...
Tue Feb 14, 10:47:00 am GMT-8
"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans."
It is far too easy in daily life to let the urgent take precedence over the important.
So it is nice to have a yearly reminder to make a big show of how much you love your significant other.
I've been with my wife for over ten years now, and thought I think I do a pretty good job of showing her how much I care on a pretty regular basis, it is kinda nice to have a yearly excuse to make a bigger deal out of it than usual.
But that doesn't mean I disagree that V-Day is a holiday that has been STRONGLY commercialized.
Nor have I forgotten how bad I hated V-Day when I was not romantically involved.
So, feel how you will. I choose to view the day as an excuse to buy candy and flowers and be more mushy than I can usually get away with.
Tue Feb 14, 01:09:00 pm GMT-8
So, feel how you will. I choose to view the day as an excuse to buy candy and flowers and be more mushy than I can usually get away with.
Exactly.
The point isn't that today is *the* day for romance. It's that it's a day you can be more romantic than usual and bedamned the cost or the risk of looking silly.
Tue Feb 14, 05:25:00 pm GMT-8
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