By Sarah El-Annan
Once upon a time, the only thing I looked forward to on Valentines Day was pillaging the local Target for all sorts of glittery heart sequin treasures, fanciful colored tissue paper, and most of all mass amounts of chocolate on sale. My greatest pangs of sadness came the day after the post holiday orgy, when I found out that some other squirrel had racked up my clearance chocolate and left me with the runt of the litter – Hershey kisses – which are great but don’t pack the punch of Cadbury or Godiva.
This year, all my holiday glee was emptied out, in its place was a morose kind of angry feeling that turned me into the Valentine’s Day Grinch. This change was all due to a relationship that ended over a year ago which introduced two words into my lexicon: 1) love (or in my case extreme like masquerading as love) and 2) romance. Romance meant recognizing Valentine’s Day not as a commercial chocolate orgy, but as a holiday to celebrate love and lovers.
This year, after the end of that relationship, I was conflicted on what exactly to do with the afterlife of the romance I had, the feelings of expectation of romantic offerings and of sadness and longing. Valentine’s Day threw me into a crisis. Why did I keep delaying my lunch on February 14th? Was it truly in the sad hope for a flower drop off or heart shaped box chocolates from my unexpected Valentine? Should I have better spent my time that day beating the crowds to Target and battling chocolate squirrels? More importantly, why are my responses to Valentine inquiries, coffee room curiosity, and nosey comments tainted with a pinch of bark and a cup of snarl?
To drown my sorrows, I turned once again, to chocolate (combined with shopping, both bring me bliss) Exhibit A. My mall ritual is to visit See’s chocolate to buy a few pieces of delicious sugar that bring me an unimaginable amount of bliss. The atmosphere in the store is usually a welcoming one with angelic white walls and uniformed beaming attendants offering free samples of sugary bliss. In my Grinch mode, I found this year’s visual display to be a garish mish mash of red and pink frills that distracted me from my truffles. When it was my turn to be rung me up, the clerk’s standard question is to throw in a ‘gift’ for ‘someone special’ that triggered a reaction to defend my single status. I really despised that woman and found myself being much more of a diva then needed to be and in naturally 10 octaves higher than it needed to be said “no that would be all for today”. Another shrill cry from the Valentine’s Day Grinch.
Exhibit B. Earlier that week I had remembered to reserve my bike at spin and the sales representative had to ask me three different times if I was sure I wanted the 6:30 on February 14th slot. I was yet again overcome by my inner Valentine’s Day Grinch and made all sorts of not funny bitter jokes about how I had no idea that the holiday was even coming up. Bad jokes are never really appropriate and bitterness is not a classy move. It reeks of unfulfilled resentment.
All in all I found myself caving into sadness that night, spacing out my sips of green tea with bites of raspberry filled heart cookies counting down the hours till midnight so that I could fall asleep and wake up the next morning and look forward to a new day without Valentines or a mention of love. Today I feel a bit silly about putting so much thought and effort and emotion into a holiday that I never really even cared about. I had always been happy in my own skin and never felt the need to punish myself for being any other way. My new resolution is to never again be overcome by the Valentine’s Grinch, to be happy in a relationship or outside of one, and more importantly to reestablish my repertoire as head day after holiday chocolate squirrel at Target!
Are you a Valentines Grinch? A fellow Clearance/Discounted chocolate aficionado? How do you drown your Valentine’s Day Sorrows? Shopping? Shoes? A combo of the above? I want to hear about how you spent your Valentines!