On Valentine's Day
Why I care so much about this holiday, which is not a Hallmark holiday in the least, and in fact, is much, much cooler than most things.
Note: if you’ve been following me for a long time, this post may seem familiar. I wrote it almost 15 years ago now, but I try to post it somewhere every year on Valentine’s Day, because I believe it’s important and I want everyone to know and care and put birds on their Valentines even if not every year feels the most loving or soft or fun. I update it here and there to keep with the times and my own developing thoughts on life, the universe, and everything—and to soften the defensiveness this essay bristled with 15 years ago when the anti-Valentine sentiment online was honestly weirdly intense. But I still believe every word and always will.
This year, it’s Substack’s turn to host the latest iteration.
Chirp!
Every year, the radio, the internet, the streams, the commentariat, and the meme economy are all full of people announcing they DO NOT and NEVER WILL like Valentine's Day, which is a stupid fake holiday no one should like because it is stupid and fake.
Some of those sentiments are nicely phrased. Some are not. Galentine’s Day seemed to help for awhile. The wink-grunt caveman-giggle references to March 14th as “his” version, Steak & Blow Job Day, literally never helped.
But I have never quite understood the desire to stomp all over Valentine's Day and snuff it, of all the holidays, it and especially it, out. And you all know by now I can be as bitter and black-hearted as the next creature of the night.
You don’t hear nearly the same vitriol for Mother and Father’s Day, Labor Day, Easter, Independence Day, even Thanksgiving. You know, the holiday with genocide in its origin story. Yet every year, as regular as Christmas carols, I hear the litany of "This is a fake Hallmark holiday and no one should celebrate it" and "I hate this day, who's with me?" and my personal favorite guilt trip: "If you REALLY loved your partner, you'd treat them specially every day."
Let's not even get into the whole "it's only for women (it isn’t) and therefore it sucks (it doesn’t)" thing.
I don't get it. Never have. I don't understand the fervor to destroy a holiday. To force others to see it through the same black glasses. To shame anyone who likes the 14th with bile, resignation, or the occasional superior sneer.
I know that most of us were shunned on Valentine's Day in school. Believe me, my little cubby was empty, just like yours, and I yearned for a construction paper heart from boy after boy (and the occasional girl, which was way too terrifying to reckon with)--and never got them. I understand that there is a history of trauma, and the standard geek reaction to past trauma is to organize the world so that there is no chance of that trauma re-occurring.
Thus, Valentine's Day must be killed.
But here's the thing.
Valentine's Day is one of my favorite holidays. Even when I'm single.
This world is a beautiful place, but it is also often dark, and cold, and unfeeling, and life slips by, not because it is short, but because it is long, and moments so difficult to hold onto. We NEED holidays. Even cringe ones. Holidays, rituals, these things demarcate the time. They remind us of the sharpness of pleasure and the nearness of death. They tell us when the sun leaves, and when it comes back. They tell us to dance and they tell us to sleep. They tell us who we are, who we have been since we lived on the savannah and hoped to taste cheetah before we died. I know we're all punk rock rebels, but the paleolithic joy of decorating our bodies and dancing around a fire and giving gifts doesn't go away just because certain of us would like to think we're beyond that. This world needs more holidays, not less. More ritual, the gorgeous, flexible, non-dogmatic kind that isn't about religion but about ecstasy in the sheer humanness of our bodies and souls. More chances to reach out, to sing, to love, to bedeck ourselves in ritual colors and become splendid as the year turns around.
And it doesn't really work to say "make every day special." First of all, most of you know damn well that you don't shower your partner with gifts and adoration and that most precious of things: dedicated, mindful time every day of the year. Even the best relationship is not a 24/7 orgiastic festival of plenty and perfect moments. No human can sustain that. If every day is special, none of them are. If every day is special, specialness becomes monotony. What makes individual days special is the time between, the anticipation of a the day, the planning, the surprises, coming together, cooking, playing, reveling in sheer time, watching the dedicated colors and rituals that wire our brain for pleasure spring up in the world to remind us that we live in it.
The entire purpose of holidays is that they are a kind of otherworld we step into, full of special symbols, special clothes, special rituals and gifts and songs and actions, that inform and shape everyday life--and a whole lot of life is just the plain old everyday, which as we grow into adults can blend and blur into one long mist if not for big colorful moments to stand out and stand up.
We celebrate the harvest. We celebrate the spring. We celebrate birthdays and death-days and the beginning of the year and the end of the year. We celebrate trees and labor and Presidents. What in the world is so terribly wrong with celebrating love? I know not all of us have partners, but it is a rare soul who is without love of any kind. Parents, children, friends, sheer human contact. All of these count as Valentines! You yourself alone and the relationship you have with your own heart is cause for celebration and treats.
Self-love is love, too.
As for the commercialism of it--well. It is commercial. So is every holiday, yet somehow we don't stomp all over Easter the way we tar and feather Valentine's Day. Valentine's Day is no more a fake holiday than any other. Everything was made up by somebody sometime, and usually the reasons aren’t that pure.
But Valentine’s Day is actually a pretty damn special case. It is older, more august, and less corporate in origin than almost all of the other days we celebrate. It was invented by one person, at one time, and we know exactly who did it. So if I hear someone call it a fake Hallmark holiday one more time I'm actually going to scream.
Here's the real and honest truth about V-Day.
Valentine's Day, boys and girls and both and neither and other, entered the Western mind in Geoffrey Chaucer's Parlement of Foules, fully-realized as a day to celebrate love via an obscure saint, with red hearts and arrows and love notes and everything. Yes, celebrated in an allegorical bird-nation consumed with debates over justice, but guess what? That makes it even more awesome. Bird Law says: today is Valentine’s Day!
I will take a holiday my man Geoff, literary genius and actual international spy for the English, invented over almost any other. If I had my way, we'd start exchanging bird-themed gifts (and book-themed!) and ditch Cupid altogether.
It's about birds and books. Winter, spent indoors reading and waiting for warmth to return. The birds coming back from their long migrations. Life coming back from its long migration. Song and flight and joy returning at last.
And more than the Geoff-ness of it all--think about the day for for a second.
In the midst of winter, we are encouraged to come together and kiss and hug and snuggle up close. To escape the snow and ice feasting and company.
The colors are red and rose and white--the colors of fire in the winter, of blood, of flesh, survival even in the barren times.
We exchange hearts, the very vital core of our bodies. Take this, it is my heart, I trust you with this thing I cannot live without.
It is the last holiday before spring, to remind us that the fertile world will come again, with flowers and sweetness and love. Even surrounded by death, by blood on the snow, be it St. Valentine's blood or your own, life will win out. Take these flowers as a promise—life is coming back to the world.
The traditional food is chocolate--which can be preserved through the winter and does not rot, full of sugar and fat which keep our bodies going through lean times. A food that can only be made by humans with leisure to think beyond basic sustenance and raw caloric survival needs and consider augmenting life with something whose purpose is sensation, not nutrients. Take this silly food and remember what we grew big brains for.
And not for nothing, but nine months from Valentine’s Day is November, a harvest month in the northern hemisphere, when food would be plentiful for mothers while they nurse through the lean months. By the time a baby was old enough for solid food, spring would have come. November remains one of the most common birth-months.
This holiday’s heart is as old as time and humans and earth: O world, even in the freezing storm, come together, find love if you can, but above all feast, smile, and know the sun is coming soon.
Valentine’s Day is a great holiday. It's pure physical, sensual pleasure, divorced from any dogma or religion at this point. It's a fertility holiday that doesn't want to admit it's a fertility holiday. Saint whatever. Medieval James Bond said: Pass the sex and food.
And if you're not into sex, or it's a difficult subject for you just now, my loves, the food is enough. The color is enough. Fertility holidays are also about the fertility of the mind, the survival of your own body, the dream of thriving within it. Be mindful of the pleasure of simply existing in a body, whether that hot baths and good books or smelling flowers or eating chocolate or wearing something oh so bright and soft. The sensuality is the point--the senses. Waking up from winter. Surviving. Seeing the color come back.
And as a medieval holiday, it has quite a long pedigree, thank you very much, even if you don't count in the Lupercalia (which you really shouldn't, unless wolf skins play a large part in your personal celebrations. If so, more power to you). The fact is, some human made up every single holiday there is. They're ALL fake. No one is more real or authentic than any other. At least this one was invented by a broke poet instead of a bunch of angry priests.
We live in a postmodern world--everything is what we make it. If Hallmark wants to force mainstream kids to buy jewelry they can't afford, they're more than welcome, though they’re not having much luck lately. I don't have to care about that, or take part in it.
Because I know better. I know this day is an act of literature made flesh. And now you do, too. Birds and books. And justice.
If you remove ritual from the world, you leave it greyer, and sadder, and all you have in its place is a long expanse of lonely time, which is a shallow and bitter triumph indeed.
And in this grim decade, for birds' sake, when so many of us have been alone, spent years unable to have that human contact, without seeing family or partners or even friends, losing so much, including our own sense of time and self, being able to remind ourselves that we ARE still here, we CAN still love, that life WILL return, bright red and sweet, is absolutely vital, a desperate need.
So, here. I give you permission to enjoy Valentine's Day. Regardless of relationship status. Regardless of anything. Have a little chocolate, look out at the melting snow, and say something kind to someone you love. Make a card with a bird on it. Write a poem. Make something, anything. Choo-choo-choose life. To be human is to take part in ritual, to demarcate the time with feasting and song and vestments and ecstasy. Life slips by, so very fast. Spend it in the practice of joy, care, kindness, and pleasure. Love yourself, love others, love existing, love surviving another year. And if all else fails, love birds and books.
There are so many worse things we feast over than that.
Happy Valentine's Day. Geoff bless us. Every one.
The real valentines were the chaucer memes you made along the way.
I have been a V-Day hater for four decades, and this essay has done more to soften my stance - or possibly reverse it, I need to give it more thought - than anything else I have read in that time. Well done.