Dusted Glen: Valentine's Day is Boring

Valentine's Day is always rife with complainers, and I used to be one of those many people until I read this (contains swearing and suggestive content in hilarious cartoon form), so today I figured I would take a step in another direction with the power of learning!

This post brought to you by Lt. Commander Geordi La Forge.

In many countries Valentine's Day is seen as kitsch and celebrated about as heartily as we celebrate Lincoln's birthday.

We celebrate heartily by growing beards and throwing pennies at people who don't wear stovepipe hats.

In others they celebrate it as we do, or have their own holiday.

A foreign tradition I'm familiar with (off the top of my head without any research) is that in Japan it is actually women who present chocolate to men on Valentine's Day (they can also give gifts of chocolate to friends, usually other girls). Only recently has there been invented White Day, a day that men provide gifts to women in return for their giving on Valentine's Day.

I'm also familiar with Ostara, which seems to be a combination of Easter and Valentine's Day, but let's go even further back than that.

The furthest back I can find would be Lupercalia, done on Feburary 13 through 15 when people try to ward off evil and promote health and fertility (I'm way narrowing this down as a description, so I suggest reading about it rather than going by my word). This holiday has connections with wolves, it being translated to "Wolf Festival" pretty much literally, and satyrs. There appears to be some dog and goat sacrifices, as well as lashings from whips to promote fertility in women, so I can understand why it fell out of favor.

Then again, I think the whole fertility-lashing might be making a comeback.

Here's my thoughts after all of this, I think Valentine's Day could use a major overhaul using a lot of other people's traditions. Men get enough grief about gift-giving during Mother's day, birthdays, and anniversaries, so let's adopt the Eastern tradition of women giving chocolate to men. While we're at it, we'll go ahead and throw in the fun parts of Lupercalia and have people dress up in furs, and instead of wasting a whole goat, we'll have a delicious chevon barbecue. We can't stop there though, there's too much cutesy-bordering-on-creepy imagery.