(or: How Valentine’s Day Taught Me the Meaning of Christmas)

I genuinely like Valentine’s Day.

That is to say, I like the version of Valentine’s Day I celebrated growing up. In my family, Valentine’s Day was (and is) primarily about familial love, as expressed through gifts of chocolate. Sure, Mom and Dad gave each other presents, but they also gave their kids presents, and (most years, when we were able to arrange the shopping trip) we gave them presents. Every year, I looked forward to waking up to the heart-shaped containers of chocolates, sitting on the dining room table or next to people’s computers. Eventually, I developed the tradition of saving the last piece of Halloween candy to eat on Valentine’s Day. (I still do that today. There’s a peanut butter cup sitting beneath my coffee table. Its time has almost come.) For dinner, we ate heart-shaped foods: hamburgers, biscuits, whatever we could mould into a heart, with heart-shaped brownies for dessert.

At my homeschool play-date and field trip group, each kid was expected to give cards to all the other kids. The parents provided candy to be shared by the group. Though I was occasionally reluctant to give a card to a child I didn’t like, I never thought of cards as being about love in the romantic sense.

When I got a little older, into my teens, I began to be exposed to other conceptions of Valentine’s Day. One of my friends complained about all the couples making out in the halls of her high school on Valentine’s Day, saying that it was hard to even dodge them all. I remember thinking it was kind of weird that that was how they responded to Valentine’s. I’d vaguely heard of romantic-supremacist approaches to Valentine’s Day, but they didn’t seem quite as real to me as what I’d grown up with.

Last year, in an open thread at the Asexual Agenda*, I saw some fellow aromantics commiserating, struggling through a holiday that so explicitly left them out and put them down. My first thought was that sure, the most mainstream interpretation is pretty bad, but it’s not hard to make it into something worth celebrating.

That’s about the point where it occurred to me that I had heard those same thoughts coming from non-Christians who celebrated Christmas. I’d never agreed with them; I thought Christmas was too poisoned by its hegemonic nature to ever be enjoyable. Yet here I was, on the other side of essentially the same disagreement.

I still despise Christmas, but I understand now why people would like it even if they don’t agree with the hegemonic aspects. I still like Valentine’s Day even though I don’t agree with the hegemonic aspects, but I understand now why people would despise it. (For that matter, even the familial-love version would still alienate many people if it were more widely enforced.)

Happy holiday to those so inclined. My sympathies to those who aren’t.

*I know people coming here from the Carnival know what blog I’m talking about already, but my followers might not. (I recommend it, by the way.)

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Tags:

#oh look an original post #carnival of aces feb 2014 #Happy Valentine’s Day from an aromantic asexual #Tolerable Christmas from an agnostic Jew