I dislike the commercialisation of love on Valentine’s Day. I also, perhaps contrarily, dislike those who don’t do things on Valentine’s Day because of their dislike for the commercialisation of love.
Plenty of people hold the traditions of religion closer to their heart than they do love and happily celebrate the vastly over commercialised frenzies like Christmas. A lot of people who don’t even believe in religion celebrate holidays like Christmas or Easter.
Why should love be different? It seems that the more sacred something is held, the more it is bloated by marketability and it’s a disservice and insult to love, not to be the biggest, most corporate and dispassionate day of them all.
I mean people have to be consistent. Love is common to everyone, whereas religion and its separate traditions are not. So Valentine’s Day ought to be part of the exponential curve of meaningless holidays, the accumulation of a 7 billion strong target audience, guilted into buying into human emotions. There are some 2 billion Christians in the world and an estimated (by me) number of 3-4 billion people who celebrate Christmas. Even if that spur of the moment number is entirely wrong, its peanuts to the 7 billion man army capable of love.
So what does Valentine’s Day get for being the single most acceptable and inoffensive holiday in the world?
Chocolates, flowers and maybe a heart shaped balloon. Pathetic! Why not a week off work to make bed shaking, spring rusting love to your significant other or to sit on the sofa weeping into your cats fur, overdosing on a couples box of Ferrero Rocher. Why not see a mass increase in overpriced acoustic guitar sales as people try and out compete each other with disastrously out of tune versions of Love Me Tender?
Why not bloat a single day of the year with market campaigns attacking basic human feeling?
Maybe love is just too sacred.
Asians pommel horse
