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There are lots of non-holidays on the calendar. When I was a kid, I knew about Mother's Day and Father's Day, but wondered why there wasn't a Children's Day. My mother informed me that EVERY day is children's day. What kind of an answer is that??? I didn't get it until I became a mother!
In my opinion, there are two holidays that never live up to the hype that surrounds them:
1. New Year's Eve.
In all my years as a viable, young adult, I dreamed of the kind of NYE that was celebrated on television--dinner and dancing with friends, all with festive hats and noise-makers, drinking until midnight, then kissing the love of your life right at the witching hour. It all looked so exciting and romantic! Truth? Unless you find yourself in the middle of Times Square in New York, half drunk, it just ain't that special! I have spent many a NYE all alone in my house-on-a-slab, watching the clock to see if I could actually stay awake long enough to see the ball drop in Times Square. I wasn't sad. I was just anxious to get the occasion over with so I could get on with what was left of my Christmas vacation from teaching.
And then there was the one New Year's Day that I got the email from the River Forest, IL, police asking if I was the sister of Douglas Covill who had, I later found out, dropped dead in a store on NYE Day...
NYE has only recently been rejuvenated in my life with the advent of my Russian-born son-in-law. New Year is the biggest Russian holiday, so the whole family tries to make it really special for him and his parents. We do the traditional Russian dishes and the midnight champagne toast, etc. It's fun, but it's not the hyped hoopla that we Americans have come to think it should be. Thank God!
2. Valentine's Day.
Do you remember Valentine's Day as a kid, when your class had a party?
We decorated shoe boxes or envelopes to tape our our desks. Teachers sent home a list of everyone in the class and made sure that we understood that no one was to be left out. We bought class collections of obnoxious little "be my Valentine" thingies--25 to a box--to write to everyone in the class. Don't know about you, but I spent hours going through the offerings to pick just the right one for each kid and print my name on it. Whew! At the end of the day, I would go through the ones I got, searching the message on each one to see if there was some secret indication about whether that person liked me or not. I'm not kidding! The messages were things like, "I'm just batty about you" with a picture of a bat. Pretty sick!
One of the things I remember as a teenager was thinking that getting a heart-shaped box of candy was the ultimate! I thought of it...dreamed of it...but it never happened. (My folks and others of their generation weren't indoctrinated. If that heart-shaped box of candy wasn't going to come from them, it wasn't coming at all...and it didn't!)
And then there was the VDay that I was called to substitute for my principal-husband's secretary (now wife--need I say more?). A little vase with a single red rose arrived on her desk from him (as with the other secretary in the school office), and all I could think was "There'd better be one of these for me somewhere later in the day." There wasn't. The message fairly screamed at me. No question about what it meant!
Valentine's Day lures people (particularly women) into thinking that if they don't have a sweetheart, they are nothing. I have seen it year after year. It's nice to think that someone out there loves you enough to give you candy or flowers or a special dinner out, but in the grand scheme of things, the only people who really benefit from this are the restaurants, the flower shops, and the candy makers. Maybe I'm just jaded by age, but little remembrances should happen every day...not just VDay! I don't feel in the least bit left out that I don't have candy to make me fat or flowers to die in the vase. I know who loves me. No one needs to prove it in the least! I am blessed to be alive to see another Valentine's Day. If you expected more than you got, I'm sorry. The hype got you. Life happens in the meantime!
I consider each day a precious gift of God's love. What more do we need??
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