Valentine’s Day: Romantic Holiday or Commercialized Waste?
Launch the media gallery 1 playerWhen February 14th rolls around each year, people everywhere honor the beloved Christian martyr, St. Valentine, and show signs of affection for their loved ones.
On Valentine’s Day, Americans everywhere show their valentine just how much they care by going out of their way to send precious gifts, lovely greetings, and other sweet sentiments. Americans fully appreciate the rich history behind the holiday full of love and all the traditions that come with it. We are led to believe that obvious compassion for others only has to be shown one day a year when there are tons of Valentine cards that say all of the sappy and sentimental phrases we may or may not really mean.
In actuality, Valentine’s Day is another unique opportunity to create a commercialized racket to celebrate a holiday that had at one time idealized a pure meaning of love. I believe our society should get rid of the Valentine’s Day holiday we celebrate today because the true meaning has been lost. The success of the commercialized approach has destroyed the real reason we used to celebrate Valentine’s Day.
The romantic holiday celebrated worldwide used to actually mean something. Does anyone truly know what the original meaning of Valentine’s Day is? Children in schools are taught at a young age about the legends of a St. Valentine who placed others’ safety above his own. Then, we turn around and teach children to go out and buy the cheapest card they can possibly find and distribute large amounts of candy to every kid in school because they care.
Valentine’s Day has since evolved into a mass-produced Hallmark opportunity to stamp a bunch of Cupids with heart eyes shooting love arrows in no certain direction on cheap cards that are passed out to anyone and everyone so they don’t feel left out. It’s turned into an expensive habit that plagues us nationwide because the commercial Valentine’s Day comes around every single year.
The unnecessary expense of bouquets of flowers, boxes of chocolates, and bundles of cards really add up to the point where we can’t afford our charismatic love for others. Americans spend around $19 billion on Valentines each year when it isn’t really necessary to begin with.
We shouldn’t need to spend the one scheduled day a year devoted to spontaneously showing others our outrageously sweet side. Technically speaking, we should show our loved ones that we care about them the other 364 days a year because we want to, not because our genuinely “deep” and “heartfelt” society tells us to.
The longer we continue to disillusion ourselves with the false ideas of a fabricated holiday that celebrates the commercialism of love, the more money we waste. The Valentine’s Day that we celebrate today has turned into a commercial syndicate operation that focuses on converting us into emotionless robots that rely on stock cards to express our own original thoughts. I think I have made my point clear that we could do without it! If we don’t do something about the undoubtedly glorified holiday that happens to be the only day a year we are able to show any signs of love, every sign of compassion and humanity we have will soon be lost to this superficial way of life.