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…are a guest column by the wonderful Georgi de Rham, an insightful observer of human behavior, vegetable enthusiast, and dear friend. Read more of her work here.
Valentine’s Day
As I’ve grown older, I’ve gotten increasingly jaded about holidays. I blame it partially on working in the retail food industry, where the holidays never stop. Thanksgiving bleeds into Christmas and New Years, which is followed by the Super Bowl, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Easter, Father’s Day, Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, Labor Day, Indigenous People’s Weekend, and Halloween, only to restart again with Thanksgiving. I’d like to point out that the Super Bowl is on this list, but Martin Luther King Day is not, which is a priceless example of an industry capitalizing on mainstream cultural events to hawk their products - the Super Bowl is not a holiday, but it is an opportunity to run an effective marketing campaign on chips, avocados, onion dip, buffalo sauce, and chicken wings. There’s not much food to merchandise in honor of Martin Luther King Jr., so as far as the grocery industry is concerned, we can pretty much forget about it.
Here’s the Merriam Webster definition of a holiday:
A holy day
A day on which one is exempt from work; specifically: a day marked by a general suspension of work in commemoration of an event
Chiefly British: vacation, often used in plural
A period of exemption or relief
In my experience, holidays rarely live up to this definition for a large segment of Americans. Service industry workers are working, often with extended hours and extra stress, businesses are promoting holiday specific products and services, and consumers are madly attempting to purchase whatever items they feel they need to create the “perfect holiday” as advertised to them by popular media. Depending on the time of year, that could mean anything from wreaths and turkeys to plastic eggs, single serve chocolate, and watermelons. In sum, it’s a stressful and expensive experience for many, rife with the expectations of tradition, where the only holy thing is the exchange of goods and services for money and the only people exempt from work are those who have somehow landed a career outside the service, retail, healthcare, or agricultural industries.
Furthermore, tradition itself is a hard thing to suss out in the context of modern holidays, which notably revolve around consumption. Surely, we all have traditions that are spiritual, personal, and intangibly valuable, untouched by marketing campaigns and mass media, but we also have traditions that are purely consumptive, like buying meaningless gifts for relatives we don’t like or purchasing holiday themed tea napkins from places like Michaels (they have one for every major holiday and every season).
Once you see it, you can’t unsee it - the myth of the “holiday,” the opportunistic cash grabs from corporations, the bids from small businesses to capitalize on everything from holiday shoppers to football fans to Memorial Day picnickers. “Celebrate!” is their rallying cry, with the subliminal undertone that if you don’t celebrate, something is wrong with you. To opt out of holidays is to opt out of the mainstream, the normative, expected, and accepted.
A particularly problematic holiday is now upon us: Valentine’s Day. Like other holidays, Valentine’s Day is an excellent opportunity to sell holiday specific items across the retail spectrum, earning its reputation as a “Hallmark Holiday” and affirming its place in the canon of capitalist celebrations. In the weeks between New Year’s and February 14th, stores stock their candy and chocolate inventory, purchase limited edition heart shaped merchandise, trinkets, stuffed animals, and a myriad of other items in shades of pink and red. Jewelers run promotions on diamonds. Restaurants offer special date night menus while grocery stores anticipate what Valentines will want to eat: filet mignon or surf and turf? Brussels sprouts or asparagus? Chocolate mousse or strawberry cheesecake? Florists fill out their inventory with roses and baby’s breath, special wrapping, and ribbon. Even the big box pharmacies are sure to boast a “seasonal” aisle of Valentine’s Day merchandise. Other companies simply abandon the traditional brand of the holiday and just use “love” as their marketing strategy: take Hannaford’s Supermarket, which simply pasted some pink on their weekly coupon flyer, added some hearts, promised some “Deals You’ll LOVE” and proceeded with their usual offerings of discounted chicken thighs, buy one get one coffee creamer, value pack fruit snacks, and suspiciously inexpensive out of season produce. Nothing says I Love You like a limp zucchini grown by underpaid farm workers! The stores, like the customers, are on a holiday deadline, which helps generate the frenetic holiday marketing: sell holiday specific merchandise before February 14th, or risk a markdown. Buy holiday specific merchandise before February 14th, or risk a failed holiday.
People have long bemoaned the commercialization of Christmas - a traditional Christian holiday celebrating the birth of Jesus transformed into a months-long barrage of Santa Claus, peppermint mochas, snowflakes, and endless shopping. It’s obvious that Christmas was originally a religious holiday, and for many, it still is, which prompted me to look into the origin of Saint Valentine’s Day, a Roman Catholic Saint’s Day before its own commercialization. The history around Saint Valentine is murky. Encyclopedia Britannica notes that there were one or two Christian martyrs of that name, while other sources believe there were several more martyred Valentines, which was a popular name in the third century. While Saint Valentine is the patron saint of lovers, he is also the patron saint of epileptics and beekeepers. Popular narratives suggest that he was a priest and physician who was persecuted for his Christianity by the Roman Emperor Claudius. Some say he married Christian couples secretly and tried to spare husbands from leaving for war. Others say he was the Bishop of Terni. The Catholic Education Center says he was both - there were multiple Valentines, all martyrs, including one martyred in Africa with little to no information offered on that event. It’s hard to determine how epilepsy and beekeeping come into the picture.
As for today’s popular celebration of love in Saint Valentine’s name, it seems we have Geoffrey Chaucer to thank, who referred to February 14th as the date on which a group of birds choose their mates in his Parliament of Foules, thereby bringing love and romance to the forefront of the Saint’s Day celebration. Was this a coincidence, or a purposeful connection on Chaucer’s part? That’s unclear, because apparently there is a whole host of saints who watch over lovers. However, many see Chaucer’s avian metaphor as a satirical device, gently poking fun at courtly love, or the code of manners and behavior that governed romantic relationships in the courts of the Middle Ages. Whether or not Chaucer’s criticism of romantic convention ultimately generated modern day Valentine’s Day traditions, the irony here cannot be lost. Birds aside, the Catholic Education Center reminds us that Saint Valentine’s Day, despite being “further paganized with cupids and the like,” remains an opportunity to reflect on Jesus’s love. Ironically, Cupid was a Roman God of love, and if any of the Saint Valentines knew that their Saint’s Day was now deeply associated with the gods of their persecutors, they would probably roll over in their martyred graves.
Like many children, I grew up associating Valentine’s Day with paper doilies and red construction paper, glue sticks, craft scissors, and the pastel sugar hearts that melt on your tongue. Valentine’s Day at my elementary school was actually pretty fun - lots of homemade cards, candy, and a shoebox decorated with glitter and glue. As I grew older and progressed along the expected social path towards heterosexual dating, monogamy, marriage, a career, and children, I learned that Valentine’s Day was relatively controversial, and frequently operated on a binary between “couples” and “singles.” Popular media suggests that if you are single, you ought to vehemently dislike and resent Valentine’s Day (a sentiment that perhaps helped generate another holiday, Gal-entine’s Day, problematic on its own), while if you have a monogamous partner, you ought to celebrate and embrace the holiday. This creates an aura of superiority around monogamy: be monogamous and be welcomed to the party, or opt out, and let February 14th be a stinging reminder of your undesirability. This subliminal narrative suggests that without a partner, you have less value and are less worthy of being included in mainstream society. Furthermore, it’s unreasonable, even perhaps a sign of personal failure, to be “alone;” success is having one romantic partner and settling down. Yet many monogamous relationships are stunningly unsuccessful, and monogamy’s definition of “alone” is narrow and self-serving: is a single, celibate, or non monogamous person who has a thriving community, a vibrant network of friends, and or multiple romantic partners really alone? What is perhaps most troubling about this messaging is its prevalence. Even from a young age, we are fed media that encourages us to think and act a certain way and aspire to a certain ideal - the ideal of monogamous romantic partnership.
Alongside the emphasis on monogamy, there’s something uncomfortably gendered about Valentine’s Day traditions. It’s hard to separate this discourse with heteronormativity: the color palette is stereotypically feminine, trending towards pink and red, and the mainstream merchandise is reliably chocolate and candy, lingerie, stuffed animals, and flowers, gifts that both sexualize and infantilize their recipients, who are traditionally assumed to be female. There’s a significant amount of critical work around the stock photos and viral memes of “women laughing alone eating salad” in relation to toxic diet and wellness culture and the social control of the female mind and body through tactics of shame and distraction, but I would argue that Valentine’s Day creates an analogous sensation: “women alone waiting for men to bring them gifts.” While recent marketing campaigns, in an effort to harness the spending power of more progressive consumers, have made an effort to “rebrand” Valentine’s Day as a day for lovers of all genders and sexual orientations, that original, deeply gendered line of marketing remains entrenched.
French communist Louis Althusser wrote about the Ideological State Apparatuses, or “ISAs,” as social and cultural modes through which the regimes in power can control a population. One of his examples was the schooling system in France, which transitioned some students into University and higher education while siphoning others into trade schools, thus furthering the class divide between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. He also viewed the Church as a form of social control, by encouraging certain practices and social behaviors through specific religious dogma and teachings. ISAs, Althusser proposed, were sometimes difficult to identify, due to their social presence as services, like public education, or cultural institutions, like the Church.
Valentine’s Day, and other commercialized holidays, are quite possibly just another rendition of Althusser’s ISAs. Celebrating any holiday overwhelmingly requires some sort of consumptive behavior, fueling the capitalist system we live in. And Valentine’s Day, a perhaps innocuous and cheerful opportunity to spread love and wear pink on a gray February day, reminds us to uphold monogamy and heteronormativity as social ideals, perpetuating the ignorant yet widely upheld belief that love can only exist in one particularly sanctioned form, and that certain practices, like buying roses or eating chocolate, are prerequisites for the “correct” expression of love.
Valentine’s Day both commercializes and polices love, profiting off an elemental and intrinsic human emotion while simultaneously controlling what qualifies as “good” or “bad” love. Lucky for us, love is as wild as a bird, and transcends the social conventions we’ve tried to bend it to since the Middle Ages. Despite what the holiday industry might try to tell us, we can set our own terms about love, however we please, on any day of the year.