I’m just a sap…

Yeah, I love Valentine’s Day. I can’t help it. I want to celebrate. I think my husband and I have plenty TO celebrate…this is our 25th Valentine’s Day as a couple! That’s a lot of Valentine’s Days. A lot of Valentine’s Day cards (and I still have every one of them!). I’ve never celebrated Valentine’s Day with anyone other than him.

But much as I enjoy the day, I really don’t need a whole lot to mark the occasion…I don’t want flowers because I hate that florists jack up the prices for today…I don’t need fancy gifts because I’m really not a fancy kind of person (neither is my husband), and we already have everything we want/need. But I do like a card. I like to get one…and I like to pick one out for him. And I like chocolate (or an adorable stuffed dog, which is what my husband gave me this year…he hasn’t given me a stuffed animal for Valentine’s Day since Teen was born…and actually that one came in a balloon and was from baby Teen, too).

The only thing I ever really want is to have a nice evening together…so we’ll go out to one of our favorite restaurants tonight and then come home and watch Lost or play cribbage. Preteen is already complaining…he doesn’t think we should get to go out alone…he made a big stink this morning about how we’re leaving him and Teen here with “no food or water.” Right. I think maybe I’ll put a slice of plain bread on a plate for him and set out a glass of water…(I WAS thinking maybe we’d stop at Coldstone Creamery on our way home and bring back ice cream for everyone for dessert, but I may have to rethink that…)

Sometime last week I read an article about a couple that decided to spend Valentine’s Day with an elderly friend or neighbor who had lost her husband of huge-number-of-years and this was her first Valentine’s Day without him. They knew the day would be hard on this woman. And to them, every day was Valentine’s Day, so they didn’t need to do anything special just the two of them. So the woman made a nice dinner for the three of them and shared stories about her and her husband’s life together. I LOVE that story! I don’t think there’s anything more romantic than a couple that has been together forever (or anything as sad as one partner going on alone after the death of a long-time life partner). If I knew somebody who had recently lost a spouse, I would like for my husband and me to do exactly what the couple in the article did and spend our Valentine’s Day with that person.