V-Day is a whole week away, but after unpacking a mixture of 20 dozen heart- and lingerie-shaped sugar cookies, I can't get the holiday off my brain.
The thing is, Valentine's Day is pretty unpopular with most people I know, and I can't quite figure out why. I mean, look at the alternatives:
Christmas: a holiday where everyone is expected to be cheerful and spend lots of money. If you aren't in the red and beaming joyfully on Christmas day, with a turkey drumstick in one hand and a mincemeat pie in the other, people think there's something wrong with you. If you get too into the Santa-side of things, your religious friends come over to douse holy water on your celebratory flames by reminding you that 'Jesus is the reason for the season'*. If you grumpily refuse to have anything to do with a supposedly religious holiday that goes against every religious teaching you believe in, people treat you like a social pariah. Either way, your loved ones force you into celebrating the event in a way you'd prefer not to. More importantly, you are forced to see your loved ones, whether you like them or not. There is very little room in this holiday for the anti-religious, the ultra-religious, the anti-consumers, the diabetics, and the vegetarians. Christmas: everyone loses.
Thanksgiving: Once again, a holiday where you are forced to get together with your family and eat copious amounts of meat. Mercifully, there is no meaningful present-exchange. However, no matter what measures you take to avoid it, there will be a part in the evening where you must stand up and tell everyone around you what you are thankful for. The dangers here are numerous: you must think of a worthy thing to be thankful for, so as to not appear ungrateful or too consumer-minded (or pig-headed). For example, being thankful you found a mini skirt you look good in, or being thankful that your colleague's handwriting is neat enough that you can cheat off her during every test, or just being thankful that the waitress's skirt is tucked into her underwear and she hasn't noticed yet, are all inappropriate things to be thankful for.
On top of this, there's always the difficulty of the racism associated with Thanksgiving. Although many people argue that it's our neighbours to the south who bring a touch of racism to a day set aside to celebrate that special time when aboriginal peoples helped the new colonial immigrants survive the winter so that the colonists could come back and kill them all with smallpox later, I'd say that Canadians are so influenced by American culture that Thanksgiving is instilled with a bit of controversial flavour here as well.
Easter: The juxtaposition of chocolate egg-laying bunny mutants with the Christian resurrection story makes this holiday as uncomfortable as most. Should we spend the holiday on our knees praying or looking under the furniture for pastel-coloured smarties? Well at least there's chocolate.
St. Patrick's Day: If your vision of The Perfect Day does not involve you puking up green beer at 4:30 on a Tuesday afternoon, then what's the point of this one?
And so we come to Valentine's Day: A day where you can do whatever the hell you want. If you celebrate it, you're not alone. If you don't celebrate it, you have an equally large support group. You can celebrate this holiday by:
Eating chocolate until you burst,
Rolling your eyes and scoffing at anyone who asks you how you're celebrating February 14th,
Wearing a lacy red negligee and lazing around on a bed of roses (regardless of whether or not you have someone to watch you do it),
Dressing all in black, lining your eyes in an inch of black eyeliner, and growling at anyone who looks cheerful,
Drinking wine with your significant other,
Staying as far away from your significant other as possible soas not to give people the impression that you actually celebrate this ludicrously cliched holiday,
Getting together with your friends to watch An Affair to Remember and have a good cry,
Getting together with your friends for a zombie movie marathon,
Sitting at home doing nothing at all...
the list goes on and on. Valentine's day is one of those holidays where really anything is acceptable. In fact, even the most brutally sullen of people can celebrate V-Day; who doesn't love an excuse to be miserable? People might actually let it slide on the Day that All Single People Are Supposed to Hate. Why not go with the flow and be as petty as possible? In fact, this being the first year where I will not be single on Valentine's Day, I don't really know what to do with myself. What will I complain about now?
This is why, in a contest between a variety of awkward semi-religious holidays with too much food or drinking, the day where you can be a bitch and eat copious amounts of chocolate will always win.
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