VALENTINE’S DAY

VALENTINE’S DAY

Yesterday was Valentine’s Day. I know that some of my readers are in countries that do not celebrate the holiday, so let me just briefly describe it: This is a holiday that celebrates love, especially romantic love. The tradition is for couples to exchange valentines (cards containing love notes). Some people give gifts. Traditional gifts are flowers, especially roses, candy, fragrances, and less traditionally, lingerie for women.

Yesterday I heard two wildly varying accounts of the history of Valentine’s Day. One of them had to do with a pagan ritual in which men drew women’s names out of a hat (“billets”) and then the men coupled up with whatever woman they had selected and the couple went into the woods and “frolicked” for the day. Then, the Christians got hold of it and turned it into something more of a religious nature. The second account I got began with the Christians. It was the one about St. Valentine, who was jailed for his religious beliefs and, while rotting in prison awaiting execution, fell in love with his jailer’s daughter and began writing sweet nothings to her (the first valentines). Who knows?

Most people will tell you, if you ask them, that St. Valentine’s Day is a “bogus” holiday, made up by the card companies and the candy companies and the flower shops to create a financial bonanza. If you ask them, most people will tell you they “don’t believe” in Valentine’s Day. Most people will go ahead and buy something for their sweetheart, lover or spouse anyway because they don’t want their significant other to be hurt. Or because, depending on the dynamics of the relationship, they don’t want their significant other to hurt them.

Also, many people like to go out to a restaurant for dinner on Valentine’s Day. The restaurants have one of their best days of the year, and in a splurge of unchecked price gouging, they present “special menus” with a “prix fix”, which translates to mean “beaucoup bucks”. The food is usually ho-hum, the rooms are crowded, the service is lousy, and you walk out noticeably poorer than you were when you walked in. Again, many people feel pressured to follow this tradition in order to “prove” to their partner that they love them.

I could certainly understand people balking at the idea of Valentine’s Day. It makes sense to me that many, many people find it unworthy of their attention, if not downright offensive. And I feel that by its very nature, Valentine’s Day is an exclusionary holiday that probably hurts many people. I know by past experience that being single on Valentine’s Day is a lot like being Jewish at Christmas – You just feel left out. What you might otherwise have celebrated as your independence, your strength of character, your alone-ness, may on Valentine’s Day simply feel like loneliness. At its heart (pun intended), Valentine’s Day is a heartless holiday for many.

Because of that, my sisters and I try to do something lovely for my mom on Valentine’s Day. Mom is single, and we are acutely aware of how that could be difficult for her when the whole world is celebrating love. Yesterday, for instance, we gave Mom some flowers, and my sister took her out for the day. There are all kinds of love, and I see no reason why Valentine’s Day should not be more inclusive. We really should honor our mothers, our fathers, our children, our friends.

Having said all that, spending Valentine’s Day with my husband is always a joy for me. Art brought me some beautiful flowers, and I made him a special dinner. We didn’t make a huge fuss, but it was a very sweet day.

I think love – in all its forms – is a wonderful thing to celebrate. Every day.

© 2005, Robin Munson

A DAY WITH MY SISTERS

A DAY WITH MY SISTERS

Some of you may remember that my sister, Michele, is getting married on January 1st, New Year’s Day, 2005. Our whole family is in happy anticipation of the event. There is a tradition that has evolved in our family. When one of us gets married, she treats the others to a manicure and pedicure a day or two before the wedding. So today I rendezvoused with my mother, my younger sister, Sherry – herself a bride of five months – and my older sister, Michele, the bride-to-be. We met at a mall in West Los Angeles and giggled and had our nails painted. As a friend of mine would say, it was “too much fun”.

At one point while our nails were drying, I looked around the salon. The place was packed with women of every description – from the very young to grandmothers, from reed-thin to zaftig, women of every ethnicity, and if I could have talked to them, probably of every religion and political stance. Women come to these places to pamper themselves, to relax, to maintain their appearance, and I think, to be among other women.

Most of the time in this world, we are required to assume the role of the “second sex”. We are helpmates to our husbands, secretaries to our bosses, nursemaids to our children. We are caretakers. We are the ones who do what others cannot or will not do. We take on the mundane tasks. We run our households. We “man” the mops. We polish the silver. We go to the market. We chauffer the kids. We call the plumber. We make the social arrangements. In short, we gather up life’s loose ends and make sense out of them. Isn’t it amazing? Doesn’t this sound pre-Betty Friedan? And yet this is the end of 2004. We are four years into the new millennium, and the only thing that seems to have changed is that now we type on PCs or Macs instead of Coronas or Olivettis.

Not that I’m complaining! I’m one of the lucky ones. I actually like my lot in life. Call me crazy (you won’t be the first) but I really like doing all that stuff. I was born to be a caretaker, so I’m not going to go into a tirade about being mistreated. Au contraire!

But for just a moment as my mother and my sisters and I sat in that overcrowded salon, I listened to the murmur of women’s voices all around me, and I imagined that there were other places all over the world where women were doing the same thing – Prettifying themselves for the new year. Laughing. Allowing themselves to just be girls for a little while, not much different than they had been as children, playing dress-up with Mama’s clothes and getting all dolled up just for fun.

It’s good sometimes to be enveloped in the feminine. I felt such solidarity with my Mom and (biological) sisters here in California, as well as my “sisters” all over the world. A picture came to mind of women in India decorating their hands with henna before the wedding day. “We are all exactly the same”, I thought. Not an original thought, but it struck me as if I had never heard the phrase before. I imagined that every woman there in that salon was a “sister” to me. If we wanted, we could probably sit down and have long conversations and feel as if we’d known each other forever. And if I spoke their language, I could probably have a coffee klatsch with women from any country, any culture, and any era, even, and we could laugh and giggle and throw off the cares of the world for a little while that way.

I wish I could give all my saddened sisters in Indonesia, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka and coastal Africa a day like the one I had today.

© 2004, Robin Munson