Valentine’s Day is a holiday for lovers, family and friends all over the world. It’s the one day of the year when love, hearts and sweet gifts are celebrated. I am someone who has always loved the concept of Valentine’s Day and what it was created for.
In the eyes of many people, Valentine’s Day has become over-commercialized and lost its novelty that makes the holiday worth celebrating. But Valentine’s Day is more than just a capitalist-centric holiday.
Saint Valentine was executed on Feb. 14, 273 in Rome for marrying people in secret during a time when marriage was outlawed, according to The Riptide.
Along with being a Roman priest, he was also a physician who was martyred during the persecution of Christians by the emperor Claudius II Gothicus, according to Britannica.
During my childhood, I always associated Valentine’s Day as being important because it was my parents’s wedding anniversary. They wanted to get married on that day and celebrate it on Feb. 14 every year because of what this holiday truly symbolized.
But as humanity and economics have developed over centuries, particularly in the last 100 years, businesses and other large corporations have taken advantage of our holidays – in this case,
Valentine’s Day – and are completely disregarding its magic for the sake of exploiting it for profit.
Feb. 14 marked the beginning of an annual tradition in Rome in which one would celebrate love with a matchmaking festival called Lupercalia. Though nobody knows the exact origin of Lupercalia, it has been traced back as far as the sixth century according to History.com
I had a conversation recently with my boyfriend on the topic of Valentine’s Day that made me start thinking more deeply about where I stand on this opinion.
My boyfriend said he wants to celebrate with me because it matters to me, but otherwise doesn’t care much for it because it's a commercial holiday.
But I truly believe the truth of this holiday is worth remembering.
So, when did Valentine’s Day start to become a corporate holiday? The Riptide article says that it is not something that happened overnight, but that the first Hallmark card in 1913 was the catalyst to the transformation of Valentine’s Day as a now capitalistic holiday.
Hallmark and other large corporations feed off of Valentine’s Day by selling chocolates and other gifts to build up multi-billion dollar companies that encourage shallow representations of love.
The entirety of how we celebrate Valentine’s Day has changed because of the power corporations now have over this holiday, and it makes me frustrated and disappointed.
Now, buying a gift on Valentine’s Day is an expectation, not just a way to celebrate love.
I’ve been paying attention to grocery stores and other department stores that I have visited in the last couple of weeks isles are lined with Valentine’s-Day-themed balloons, roses, teddy bears, chocolates, etc.
I thought about how all these gifts and decorations were likely made to be merely visually appealing to customers. Thus, since customers know a holiday is approaching, there is a greater incentive to buy all of these products.
I suppose this thought didn’t surprise me, but it was still disappointing to take a step back and think about how corporations and companies are not meant to care about these holidays but to profit from them.
An article from Stationary Trends presented a 2017 flash poll conducted by the National Retail Federation and found the most common reasons why consumers choose not to celebrate Valentine’s Day.
A 2017 flash poll conducted by the National Retail Federation found consumers chose not to celebrate Valentine’s Day was that they considered it over-commercialized, didn’t have anyone to celebrate with or weren’t interested anymore.
While that might sound like love is on the decline, this data fails to tell the full story on its own.
I wouldn’t call any holiday capitalistic because no holiday is inherently capitalistic, they have just become that way.
They all have meaningful significance and I hope that young people will begin to remember the history and reasoning behind Valentine’s Day and have a more positive reason to celebrate it.
