My Five Valentines

We take Valentine’s Day pretty seriously in my house. It’s one of my favorite fake holidays. That last part is redundant since all holidays are fake. You can’t find them naturally occurring in the wild. Even when they commemorate a real event, holidays don’t exist on their own. Washington’s birthday didn’t magically appear on the calendar. Calendars and birthdays are both artificial constructs. We’re arbitrarily celebrating the moment someone left their mother’s womb by commemorating it at the moment the Earth is in the same relative position to the sun, even though both the sun, the planet, the galaxy, and space itself are all in different absolute positions as the universe expands at the speed of light. From that broad perspective, there’s no reason to diminish Valentine’s Day in particular, but there’s a great reason to diminish the human experience in general since we’re tiny specs of self-important sentience in a vast and uncaring cosmos. That’s a little too meta for the purposes of this newsletter. I choose to be petty and enjoy any excuse to buy little treats for my family. You can look forward to another existential hot-take on holidays and the nature of reality around Arbor Day.

To me, Valentine’s Day isn’t just for couples in romantic relationships. I always make sure to also get something for my kids. That means I need five sets of gifts. It’s never anything extravagant. I typically go to the dollar store and spend eight to ten dollars per person, which nets me forty to fifty small gifts. It looks like a king’s ransom when arranged in five separate piles on the dining room table. Gifts usually include chocolate roses, chocolate hearts, and chocolate, well, anything else. I guess I’m really just paying for different shapes of the same candy over and over again. There are a few outliers. I try to grab at least one thing that’s marshmallow-based if it’s available. It’s important to hit all the dessert food groups. I also buy a dozen or so individual packets of flower seeds. That’s enough to fill both of our raised flower beds. At least it should be. None of them have ever grown. Now that I think about it, the dollar store might actually be selling me packets of very small stones. That’s okay. I still get credit for making my girls happy on Valentine’s Day. As long as their disappointment is still somewhere in the future, I’ve done my job.

This year, I broke with tradition. Instead of going to the dollar store, I went to Walmart. No, I didn’t suddenly become a big spender with all this Substack money. That just happened to be where I was on the one night last week when I had time to shop. We had to make an emergency mid-week trip because Betsy needed baking supplies. She was going to a cake-decorating sleepover for her friend’s birthday. High schoolers these days know how to have fun. I needed to get my Valentine’s gifts early anyway because two of my children would be away on a campout all weekend. In fact, they were at a BSA meeting to plan it while we were shopping. Waffle joined us on the shopping trip because she needed to buy Valentine’s cards and gifts. She’s the only one still young enough to hand them out in school. When she ages out of that, she’ll officially be an adult. Since I had half my intended Valentine recipients with me, I gave up on being secretive. I simply asked Betsy and Waffle what they wanted. I bought off-brand Lego flowers and a family-size bag of Takis for each kid. I’m sure cupid would approve.

I also bought a giant box of chocolates. Everything is more fun when it’s comically oversized. My crew is partial to big candy. A few years ago, I bought a three-pound Hershey’s bar for them to share. They’re still talking about it. Normal portion sizes are way less fun. This year, Walmart didn’t have much to offer in the giant candy department. They had huge Kit-Kats, but they turned out to just be oversized Kit-Kat boxes with normal sized Kit-Kats inside. What a let down. Lola vetoed mega gummy bears and gummy video game controllers because she didn’t want a huge wad of hardening sugar stuck to the table. The giant box of chocolates was our best option. When we got home, we discovered it was actually six normal-sized boxes of chocolate inside one large exterior package. You can’t win them all—but you can certainly lose most of them. My life is proof of that. This newsletter has a moral after all.

Waffle’s shopping for her class was more challenging. Due to dietary requirements and food allergies, kids aren’t allowed to give out candy anymore. Schools don’t want any Valentine’s Day fatalities. They’re no fun. Kids were limited to non-edible gifts, which could still be fatal if you choked on them. Anything can be deadly if it fits in your mouth. Waffle opted for a bag of tiny Rubik’s cubes. That seemed like a good choice. Then again, there weren’t many options. She probably received five mini-Rubik’s cubes in return for every one she gave out. I look forward to small, colorful squares being left all over the floor where they’ll be waiting to maim bare feet. Deadly candy might have been safer after all.

I laid all of the Valentine’s Day bounty out on the table as soon as I got home on Wednesday night. Lola’s pile was slightly different than everybody else’s. She shared the giant box of chocolates but also got a separate package of Take 5 candy bars and also a bag of barbecue chips. Nothing screams romance like heavily seasoned slices of potato. In return, Lola and the girls gave me permission to exist around them for another year. It was a fair trade.

That wasn’t our only Valentine’s endeavor. Lola and I also accidentally planned a winery trip for the 14th. When we organized the outing, neither of us recognized the significance of the day. It was simply the only Saturday on our calendar when Betsy didn’t have show choir. The trip was necessary because Lola needed a refill of her favorite wine from her favorite winery. We first visited the venue after “winning” a wine tasting for twenty at a charity auction. She used it for her fortieth birthday party. Instead of simply returning to restock, we turned the day into our own self-guided winery tour. I don’t have a party bus, but I do have a minivan, which is even better since I don’t have to rent it. I don’t mind being the designated driver since the nuances of wine are lost on me. I’m a garbage person with garbage tastes. I’m perfectly happy with the cheapest vodka Costco has to offer. To make it a proper tour, we invited our board game friends, Peter and Delilah. Now that we have Board Game Arena on our phones, any outing can be a board game outing, much to the resentment of everyone but me. My friendship is a burden. The day was set for a romantic double date that wasn’t supposed to be romantic or a date at all. We were definitely doing it wrong.

The general public didn’t get the memo that this wasn’t a celebration of love. Countless other Indiana couples decided to make Valentine’s Day special with winery visits of their own. The best move we made Saturday was going to the biggest, most popular winery first. The real reason we started there was that it opened the earliest, but an unintended side benefit was that we beat the crowds. We got there right when they unlocked the doors. They were clearly staffed for a big day. When we ordered the first wine flight, there were roughly ten workers for each of us. We weren’t good enough customers to justify that level of service. Being a popular brand, it’s available in grocery stores in half the country. It’s also cheaper in those grocery stores. At the winery, we were paying a premium to be waited on hand and foot. After the flights, we opted to leave without buying any bottles. The staff didn’t take it personally. Hundreds of people walked in the doors after us. It’s good to be easily replaceable.

Winery number two was just five miles away. I liked that place better because it let us bring in our own food. That beat eating in my vehicle. A minivan offers many things, but a fine dining experience is not one of them. The second place was too full for us to sit in the dedicated dining area, but they had kindly set up card tables in the back warehouse portion with the giant steel vats of wine. That’s where we belong. Honestly, I liked the industrial ambiance. It beats a cozy, romantic vibe any time. We ate, and the three non-drivers enjoyed another wine flight. Each flight came with a complementary brownie and scoop of ice cream. I didn’t buy any wine, but they gave me a brownie anyway. That’s how you guarantee the party van driver always makes your winery a future stop. It’s not like they lost money on us. Lola also bought half a case of wine for our stockpile back home. We have the world’s finest budget-rate wine collection in our unfinished basement. It’s like a real wine cellar but better because it achieves those perfect temperatures by accident. The wet floor adds to the experience. Every good wine cellar needs a water feature.

Our last winery of the day was the one with Lola’s favorite wine. I was discouraged to discover they had live music, but, for the first time ever, the venue did it right. The musicians played at a reasonable volume so the rest of us could hear ourselves talk. It was a radical departure from most places with live music, which think they drive up sales through hearing damage. We bought a couple of bottles of wine and went to the basement to chat and listen to the performance. I used that opportunity to spend two hours trying to reactivate my Apple TV subscription on my phone. I’m a delight at parties. I wasn’t being totally selfish. Peter wanted to watch Season 2 of Severance when we got back to his house. It’s always a pain because I don’t own any Apple devices, which makes the company think I’m an untrustworthy deadbeat trying to scam them. I reset my password a million times over two hours and never succeeded at buying a year subscription, but the company did finally grudgingly agree to let me pay month-to-month. The winery was less reluctant to take my money. We bought a case of Lola’s favorite wine, which should last her until the apocalypse. The only downside is now we won’t have an excuse for another self-guided winery tour. Maybe I’ll have to help her drink it.

After the last winery, we returned to Peter and Delilah’s house, where we had pulled pork that had been in the slow cooker all day. We made it through three episodes of Severance before half of our group started to fall asleep. We’re very old. Lola and I got home by our normal bedtime, which is how all great adventures should end. It was the perfect Valentine’s Day, even if none of the stuff we planned or did was actually for that fake holiday.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.

James