VD
Why are you being hustled by street vendors to buy sad and drooping former roses, vegetative 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.
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 badgers, or had hemorrhoids.
4 comments
VD. The gift that keeps on giving. 🙂
You’d think there would be a vaccine by now 😉
Yeah… I don’t think I’ll touch that, even with hazmat gloves.😜😏
I’ve never seen the point, even as a young man.🤔🤷🏾♂️
I used to just get my GF a gift just because I wanted to do something nice, or have a picnic if it was a really nice day. Especially if she was having a bad day or something like that. Was I supposed to say “Hey… I know you’re having a tough day, but you’ll have to wait until next February before I can get you something to cheer you up.”
It’s ALWAYS about the 💵💰💳. There is no sincerity or spontaneity any more. Just the paid for expectation of yet another forced gift because it’s a Birthday, Valentines, Christmas… yadda! Mom hated them all as do I. We gave each other a gift when it wasn’t expected & it was worth so much more (in non-financial terms). We should give a gift because we want to, because we want to make someone happy… Not because it’s mandated! Humans really do suck.👎🏾😒
I replied to a thread about Climate Change & what Humans will do & when. After I stopped laughing enough to type that is.
“Given Human history, I doubt any corrective action will be taken in time. Earth will be fine. It will shrug off the Human disaster, heal itself over however many centuries it takes, & perhaps evolve a replacement. Hopefully one that never invents religion, money, politics or war.”
Yes, there is a major difference in the value of a gift or a donation if it is freely given for no other reason than you want to, as opposed to you are expected to. I’ve never deducted charitable donations from my taxes and prefer that no one knows that I’ve done it. Being thanked for a donation always bothered me.
Yes, the people complaining that AOC’s Green New Deal is a crazy left-wing extreme socialistic plot will not look at the reality of the changes that have taken place in the climate in the last few decades. A third of US voters think Trump should be able to spend billions of dollars on a worthless wall, but don’t want to spend for a sustainable future. If elected officials had taken Jimmy Carter’s advice back in the late 1970s, we wouldn’t be watching Miami drown.