Once again, it's Valentine's Day! And like all V-days that had come and gone, love is in the air again...
As a kid, I've thought of Valentine's Day as total hogwash - what's the point? The date has been marked X on a lot of calendars, highly anticipated by many...
indeed, it is a special day, but confusingly not a holiday! Still a regular-working day, and as a kid, that meant there's still the need to get out of bed and go to school...
grrrr...
so again, what's the point? The people who created Valentine's Day probably didn't have commercialism in mind back then, i guess...
but hundreds of years later, it has become exactly that.
A day when prices of dating commodities like flowers, chocolates, contraception, etc, skyrocket...
dinners become several times more expensive...
gigs like concerts, stand-up comedies, movies, and yes, even your local drive-in motel chain, make a killing.
I mean, this day was supposed to be heart's day...
apparently, not a lot of people "heart" their money that much.
lol The color of the day is red.
To the Chinese, it is the color of luck...
to very important persons and celebrities, the color of their carpets, denoting power and glamour.
Yet, to emergency cases it denotes grave danger, even war...
to traffic flow, it means stop...
and most bizarre of all, to sharks, it means food is up for the kill!!! lol...
Still, to the general public, the valentine's day red is the color of love.
oohhh, mi amore! hahaha How it got its official color and how valentine's day came to be is interesting to note...
St.
Valentine, the man the day was named after, was a martyr who was arrested, imprisoned and later condemned to death.
He was beaten with clubs, stoned, bludgeoned and bloodied dry...
when that failed to kill him, he was beheaded at the gates of Flaminian.
A gruesome end to the man the day is commemorated for...
an ironic back story to the day we have dedicated to LOVE! In his winding days, St.
Valentine was seeing bloody red...
so much so that it probably became the reason why red is V-day's official motif.
Well, probably not.
Years passed, today I'm no longer the kid I once was, and though my view of Valentine's Day is still what's-the-point-still-not-a-holiday and despite all the commercialism behind it, I have grown to realize a great thing about V-day...
that between families getting together, friends in celebration, boring relationships spiced up, and babies being born 9 months later - there is, beyond all that, a deeper meaning...
that in this war-torn world where animosity and anger are common themes...
where hunger, death and suffering prevail...
no matter how shallow or deep, valentine's day makes people believe in LOVE...
even for just a day.
Peace and love, -darryl