VD
Why are you being hustled by street vendors to buy sad and drooping former roses, vegetable matter that missed the cut for bouquets, or were too late to the hospital?
Blame Esther A. Howland (1828 – 1904) of Worcester, Massachusetts. Her guilt is writ large by the Greeting Card Association’s Esther Howland Award for a Greeting Card Visionary. She imported the concept to the US from Britain to bolster her father’s stationery store in 1847.
Of course, it wasn’t long before the stationers had infiltrated school boards and imposed the now mandatory exchange in the classroom to push the low end product of Asian children and prisoners and scar children for the rest of their lives.
Seeing the success of the card merchants, the confectioners jumped on board to fill the lull between Christmas and Easter with the benefit that the bulk of purchases would be made by desperate men with less sense of taste than a golden retriever. If the box was red, heart-shaped, and said chocolate, a man would buy it.
There were at least three Saint Valentines and all were martyrs, as they should have been for the trouble they’ve caused. None are the reason for the “holiday”, only the excuse. They lived at a time when life and men were short and brutal, so the romantic aura of the holiday is pure piffle. At least one was reportedly part of a draft dodging scheme during the Roman Empire, marrying people so that men with “other priorities” could avoid being deployed to foreign wars, bachelors being preferred for catapult fodder.
It is to be hoped that the individual who first wrote: “Roses are red, violets are blue” was eaten by rabid wolverines, or had hemorrhoids.
[Yes, this is the same as last year. You don’t think I’m going waste neurons on faux holidays. With the careful application of Liquid Paper you can re-use cards and sometimes get away with it – if you don’t send them to the people who sent them to you.]
5 comments
Whenever I hear “Roses are red,” etc., I am reminded of:
Roses are red,
Violets are blue.
Some poems rhyme;
This one don’t.
Ah Yes… a Commercial Faux Holiday in the name of that “Saint Somebody or other” – but the world can NEVER have too much Chocolate!
😉
Karen beat me to it. You may be the Valentine’s Day equivalent of Scrooge if you will, but any day on which chocolate is the rule is a good day. Fake? Chocolate is as real as it gets!
Hmm it may be a “Hallmark holiday” (is that the right expression?) but it was a case of no chocolate, no prospect of living!
If you need a holiday to eat chocolate, you need to reorder your priorities.
On a mailing list I met a wonderful lady from Switzerland who has since died. She owned a chocolate company and would occasionally send me a “fix.” It was the real thing, none of that commercial, chemical stuff.
Actually, it was your holiday, Jams, that got highjacked. That is, indeed, the correct term for all of these “occasions” that seemed to be designed to sell cards, flowers, and candy by manufactured guilt.