Happy V Day

If there was ever a minefield holiday, it's Valentine's Day.  You start picking your way across it while still in elementary school.  Who can ever forget the white paper lunch bags sitting like little sentinels on each desk.  Right before recess, everyone was supposed to drop their valentine for each person in the class into each bag.   The Valentine Day bags were decorated with crayons (1st, and 2nd grade), construction paper hearts (3rd and 4th grade), and then, beginning in the 5th grade, you had to decorate at home and bring it in.  Boys reverted back to one hastily drawn crayon heart with their name under it while for girls, this was the first fashion statement. Those valentine bags were precursors to wearing the right or wrong outfit to the first day of junior high school.

If the teacher was unvigilant, the unpopular kids in class would find their bags woefully short of valentines, while the most popular girls started getting REAL valentine cards as early at the 4th grade.  The rest of us had to content ourselves with punch-out valentines, 36 to a box.  Those flimsy cards with images of Mighty Mouse, Popeye, Bugs Bunny, Sleeping Beauty, (the Disney cartoon princess of 1959), Yogi Bear, the Flintstones, or the Jetsons rested in an untidy heap in the bottom of each bag together with suckers, Smartees, Double Bubble, Tootsie Roll pops, or the ever popular miniature box of chalky, candy hearts stamped with shorthand love sentiments in red dye #7.  Moms didn't care about sugar consumption at school.  It was all about being able to fill each bag in the class with a cheap piece of candy.  My most unexpected valentine bag item was in the 5th grade. I pulled out an actual piece of jewelry (pink rhinestone heart necklace) from Stanley somebody.  That year was the ONLY year I ran with the popular girls. Why or how that happened is still a mystery to me.

In junior high, white bags vanished, teachers dropped out of the equation, and valentine cards were shoved into locker vents. OK, again, shoved into the POPULAR girls' lockers.  Valentine popular seemed to equate to either breast development, or if you had a 'steady'.  At Eli Whitney Junior High, a steady was a boy you held hands with when you walked in the hallways before school. At age 13, steadies could change daily. Some girls, like me, were still playing with Barbie dolls and paper dolls, albeit with the door closed, so no one would know.  I sensed I shouldn't still be playing with dolls, but in the 7th grade I found them more fun than boys.

When high school rolled around, Valentine's Day became SERIOUS BUSINESS.  If you had a boyfriend, he was expected to deliver the goods preferably at school in front of your friends.  There were heart shaped boxes of candy, bouquets of flowers, large stuffed animals, bracelets, necklaces, and if you were a Senior, the possibility of a Valentine's Day engagement ring (seriously!).  Good grief!  What were we thinking.

Think being married gets you off the Valentine's Day hook?  Hardly.  The minefield explosions of Valentine's Day just get bigger.  About the only difference between today and yesteryear is it's now a two way street.  Men expect acknowledgements of love as well as women.  While Drake doesn't care a whit about any holiday, much less one which he has dark suspicions the greeting card/floral companies dreamed up, woe be it to him if he 'forgets'.  And in my holiday crazed brain, a card just doesn't cut it.

So.....Happy Valentine's Day.  I just hope you make it through without blowing yourself up.