Is Valentine’s Day All About Love?

Yes, of course it is!

Love of card sales. And actually, sales of almost anything else you can imagine!

Try booking a table for two in a popular restaurant, especially if Valentine’s Day falls on a Friday, a Saturday or, like this year, a Sunday. You can find special Valentine screenings of Love Story or some other appropriately sentimental melodrama. Our local chocolate shop is full of it – and hopes to be empty of it I suppose come next Monday. The kiddies’ clothes shop idem ditto although the relevance eludes me. The trendy silver jewellery shop has gone absolutely heart-shaped; cardiac I suppose you could say.

And I’m not even going to mention the florists!

It seems to have gone full cycle, so to speak. The exchange of small, hand-written notes of several centuries ago has been replaced by a commercial free-for-all.

And does anyone know anything about Saint Valentine anyway? Google him and you’ll discover that actually nobody knows anything very much at all. Once established, the idea just seems to have gained in popularity in certain countries. I say “just” but everyone seems to be agreed that the saint lived some seventeen hundred years ago. Oh well!

And it’s not an entirely English-speaking thing either, although the US, the UK and Canada and Australia seem to be the greatest exponents of the art. France and the Benelux got on the bandwagon some years ago as well and it’s a growing feature in the card-makers calendar in many parts of Europe and beyond these days.

It now seems to be one of those commercial hypes that you not only can’t avoid, but you sort of derive some pleasure in going along with. Although it is commercial, unnecessary, irritating, aggravating and even depressing all at the same time, and probably a whole lot of other things with double consonants in them as well, it’s still rather endearing and comforting and any number of single-consonant warm, cuddly  things, too.

So is it all about love? Yeah, deep down!

Author: Guest Writer – Chris MacAdie


Posted

in

, ,

by

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *