Be Mine, Billy???

Yesterday was Valentine’s Day and I made the obligatory trip to the CVS Sunday evening with the rest of the dads who drew the short straw to find those little, tiny, overpriced cards with obnoxiously cute sayings on them that come in what seems like only packs of 10 or 100 for one of my sons to write a bunch of names on and hand out to the girls in his class.

I know what you’re saying, “that is one very long run on sentence Half Dead Guy”, you need to lay off the Starbucks.  Well, not only that, in case you may have just skimmed it, I, apparently, dropped my political correctness into the abyss on that one.  How you ask?  Well, to my surprise and amusement, Valentine’s cards aren’t just given out to children of the opposite gender, they are now give out to all kids.

When I was a kid, we talked to our friends about who we liked, who we were going to give notes to (100% hand-written, BTW) and made them for the girls we liked.  Then, the morning of Valentine’s Day, mom would make us write notes to all of the rest of the girls.  There was 100% coverage.  To me, this seemed to work just fine.  I wasn’t disappointed when I didn’t receive forced sentiment from my friends who were boys, or girls for that matter.  The girls I didn’t like knew they were receiving cards solely because my mom made me.  There was agreement and understanding and it was all good.  Of course, we also wrote a note to the teacher because almost all teachers were women and it never hurts to suck to authority a little bit, right?

Children exchange over 1 billion valentines each year, doing a little math I calculate that number is almost twice what it would be if kids only exchanged cards with the opposite gender.  Somewhere, on a sunny Florida golf course a very cleaver, retired marketeer is walking up to a green saying, “Yep, I’m the person that convinced everyone to exchange Valentine’s cards, doubling the greeting’s card industries profits” – and it was a hole in one.