(This blog was first written in 2010, so there may be some anachronisms, but it's an archive worth reiterating.)
February is the most holiday-filled month of the year, between Ground Hogs' Day, Presidents' Day, and Valentine's Day. If we count Washington and Lincoln's birthdays as separate events, which they really are, then the number jumps up by one.
I have this idea that one of these days we'll have a Super Monday, which will encompass every holiday of the year-we're headed in that direction, aren't we?
Mother's and Father's Day will be consolidated into Parents' Day, which can collude with Memorial Day, speaking of remembrance, which falls halfway between them.
We can merge July 4th with Memorial Day and throw in Veterans' Day and, while we're waxing patriotic, add Presidents' Day to this jumble, and since presidents work so hard-witness the "before" and "after" shots of presidential couples released recently-Labor Day.
I could go on, but you get the idea.
Perhaps it's evident that I just finished chuckling over a Jon Stewart UTube on the Gore mashers. He's contagious.
But the real point of this blog is that tomorrow, the most important holiday of the year will actually be celebrated on the day it deserves, Sunday. It is not considered important enough to lump onto Monday with, say, Parents' Day, and unless it falls on a weekend, we receive no time off from work.
It celebrates two concepts we take for granted and parody as often as enact: loving and giving.
It popularized the association of that fist-sized muscle that keeps us going, the heart, with love, which to me is equally important in that it keeps our lives going. Maybe it's not as important or powerful as money, but it should be. Just remember: all those gonifs running Goldman Sachs and CareFirst BC/BS, Netflix, CVS, McDonald's, and Apple and Google and Microsoft had mothers who loved them more than life itself.
Where would they be without that love? In prison?
I insist that even in the utterly decadent world we inhabit today, love is a driving force, in the absolute sense. Love between people, as opposed to love of money.
We are so adorable as children. Why do we turn into such monsters? I suggest some genetic alteration that might keep us adorable and loving throughout life.
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Now there are various versions of the origins of this most marvelous day of the year, all having to do with a Saint Valentine who was martyred for some act of selfless loving and giving sometime in the early first millennium in the Roman Empire.
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