365 Valentines A Year

For some, Valentine’s Day has become nothing more than a Hallmark Day, a day for mass-produced greeting cards and commercialization. Love and romance are always good for sales. Ahhh capitalism. What hath love wrought? Perhaps it could serve as the next great economic stimulus. More chocolates! More wine! More flowers! Buy buy buy! Sell sell sell!

With that said, much of the history of Saint Valentine has little to do with romance. But I am sure that many people have fond memories of Valentine’s Day. As a child, you may have handed out cards to your friends at school, hoping that they might want you to be their valentine too. Once you were a little older, it might have meant something more. Maybe that card was given to the little blond girl in your eight grade math class on whom you had a crush. Or perhaps you had just started dating someone, and there it was, a nice romantic day on which to spoil your new-found love interest. Or maybe it’s a day to just get back to basics with your spouse.

Maybe Valentine’s Day does serve a purpose of having one special day to truly make a point of enjoying that special someone’s presence in your world. But the more I think about it, the more I realize something important. Maybe every day should be Valentine’s Day. Perhaps what we need is to express (and appreciate) more love – on a daily basis – and not have it become just a once-a-year celebration.

Maybe, just maybe, this has become yet another arbitrary day of celebration. It has gone the way of New Year’s Eve - an arbitrary way of marking the changing of a year on the calendar. In truth, we should probably be using our day of birth as the day to “ring in a new year”. That day isn’t so arbitrary.

Perhaps in the midst of our daily lives, we lose sight that each and every day really should be filled with the love of friends and family and intimate companions. Perhaps each and every day we should appreciate the presence of those people in our lives that make our world a better place.

Maybe we really need 365 days of love a year. Of course, Hallmark probably wouldn’t be so happy and chocolate shops probably wouldn’t have quite the same sales around February 14. But love is something that really shouldn’t (and doesn’t) need a special day to celebrate. Sharing that love on a daily basis is critical and easily forgotten.

If that is the case, I can say without question that I am definitely looking forward to the next Leap Year.

Don’t lose sight of the beauty and wonder that love brings to your world, and how amazing it is to express that to someone else. If we all put a Valentine’s worth of love into the world every day, I can only imagine what it would be like.

Call me an optimist. Call me a hopeless romantic. Just don’t call me mushy. And bring on the chocolate.

Photo credits: Wikipedia