BY EMILY HARRISON / KALAMALAMA STAFF WRITER
Who doesn’t love a day about love sweets flowers and surprises? Me. That’s who.
I don’t know who decided Valentine’s Day is the day we show we care about our partners and other loved ones, but they created a monster.
Shouldn’t you always be showing your loved ones you care about them? Shouldn’t you show them in personal ways how well you know them and how much you love them?
Why have a once-a-year holiday to show someone you care about them? That’s how you become single.
My Idea of a Perfect Valentine’s Day
It may be because I’m biased but honestly, I don’t like valentine’s day. I can appreciate the idea, but it’s usually executed wrong. So, with that being said, my ideal Valentine’s Day would go like this:
I would sleep a decent amount into the morning. I’d wake up to a lovely breakfast of muffins bacon and eggs. Best of all, my home, would be clean, and I could celebrate the day from the start with my boyfriend, who current lives 4000 miles away from me. What a dream to be able to spend it with him.
For the main event I’d have our friends join us on a trip to the zoo. The nearest zoo to my home is a rescue zoo, it’s small, but it’s perfect.
In Indiana February is quite cold, but we have a good number of animals in our zoos who actually enjoy the cold, especially when there’s snow. It’s adorable and so heartwarming to watch the happy animals play around in their winter wonderland.
After a couple hours of adorable fun, we’d all go to dinner where there’d be subtle Valentine’s decorations, enough to remind what the day is.
No one would sing that song to me, but we would all enjoy a nice ice cream cake for dessert. An ice cream cake is the special thing I do for my birthday.
Everyone would make it home safe, and I could enjoy the rest of the night reading by the fire with my boyfriend, surrounded by the many dogs that I have.
What I actually did for V-day
As the, now, 21-year-old that I am, I celebrated Valentine’s Day with the people I love. Firstly, my mother came into town and spent most of the day with me.
I did have a test that day, so did many, thank you Holland.
But afterword’s I had a nice afternoon at Magic Island catching up with my mom and reading with the sun on me.
When I finally did make it back home, I came home to a decorated apartment full of balloons of my favorite colors and streamers elegantly strung across the apartment. It honestly made my day better.
I ended my day with on FaceTime with my boyfriend, where we shared a virtual dinner, because he lives so unbelievably far from me. We had burgers and milkshakes and caught up with each other for the rest of the night.
It, overall, was a good birthday, and Valentine’s Day.
Why do I Disapprove of it?
Valentine’s Day is so wonderful….at making people believe that they must go over the top and show the world how much they are loved, or worse, how much they love someone in their lives. I may be biased on this subject, after all Valentine’s Day is also, my birthday.
You know, your birthday. The day that you get to go out and celebrate with your loved ones, something that’s supposed to be celebrating your life and be a day for you.
It’s very fun to go out and celebrate that day with the REST OF AMERICA.
It’s honestly worse when you’re young, you get other couples pretending to tolerate one another when they have been dating for fifteen minutes because Valentine’s Day is tomorrow.
Or you get the people who desperately want a Valentine’s Day date, but their crush, or everyone else in the school, is taken, or “has better things to do”, because being “cool” is better than falling in line with the crowd and not spending Valentine’s Day alone.
Unfortunately, the alternative is indeed being alone. Knowing millions of people are celebrating this day, the day for love and romance, and you’re home, alone, ignoring everything related to the name of “Valentine”.
Some people, I will admit. Do the holiday right. They don’t go overboard, but they do give simple gestures to make sure one another is loved, and make a night of it because they can, but there are also others who ruin their entire evening jumping through hoops because they think that’s what needs to be done in order to “do Valentine’s Day right.”
It’s awful.
My Suggestions for the Holiday
I think the best solution is for everyone to take it a little less seriously, if we all consider that Valentine’s Day is meant to celebrate those you love, it doesn’t have to be romantic, and it’s not a status thing.
It’s supposed to be pure, and full of genuine love. A way to strengthen a relationship.
If we just stop and consider what that means to us, then the holiday would be much more enjoyable.
I hope you all had a wonderful Valentine’s Day, I do, and those of you who share my pain of having your birthday be on Valentine’s Day. I hope you had a great time with your loved ones, and, hopefully, got to have some fun.
