Don’t lose your head over this romantic holiday
Trevor's Take
A graduate of the University of Toronto, Trevor Hutchinson is a songwriter, writer and bookkeeper. He serves as Contributing Editor at The Lindsay Advocate. He lives with his fiancee and their five kids in Lindsay.
I’ve always been a ‘take the bad news first, good news second’ type of person. So the bad news is this hell-hole of a month actually has an entire extra day this year. That’s 24 extra hours of the frozen version of a dumpster fire (for those who like to quantify their misery).
The good news? It’s Valentine’s Day this month! Heck yeah! Anyone who knows me knows that romantic comedies are my thing. I spend hours glued to the Hallmark channel: I’m basically a dyed-in-the-wool uber-romantic. The 14th of hell month is my sweet, sweet love jam.
Alright, I can’t lie. The part about me being a romantic bears zero truth. But I have been taking a lot of online self-improvement courses of late, and a common theme in that genre is ‘fake it until you make it.’ So after a couple years of hitting the performative low bar of Christmas crap, I have now set my sites on Valentine’s Day, with a modest goal of not underperforming too much.
I’m a data nerd so I need facts as a starting point. As a religious studies grad looking into Saint(s) Valentine seems a good place to start.
Interestingly, there are actually three Saint Valentines who are celebrated on Feb. 14. None have any association with romantic love. For the Catholic (and Anglican) churches, the date commemorates their martyrdom – when they were killed by Roman officials for their beliefs. At least two and possibly all three of them were beheaded.
For those of us that find some correlation between the mating rituals of humans, to say, those of the praying mantis, celebrating romantic love on the anniversary of historical decapitations might make a certain amount of sense. Not that losing one’s head, by chewing, blade or otherwise, is at all funny.
The tradition as we know it really starts to get going with the English writer Chaucer in 14th century England. He wrote about mid-February being the mating period of birds. That came to be associated with a time to exchange love notes. By Shakespeare’s time, his character Ophelia self-refers as “Hamlet’s Valentine’ (Spoiler alert – that story doesn’t end that romantically.)
Now some people might think that with our climate, mid-February is not really our time for bird mating. Yet some of our most iconic birds get it on in February. Interestingly the Canada Jay, Bald Eagle and the Great Horned Owl mate in February, which sounds almost patriotically romantic to me.
And so I have come to realize that it doesn’t matter what the deBoers or Hallmark’s or Cabdurys of the world have done with this day. As long as we don’t lose our heads, and stay warm somehow, it’s all roses and chocolate baby!
In 2024, St. Valentine’s Day fell on Ash Wednesday too, so all the associations with death were doubled. Still, it doesn’t hurt to once a year celebrate love in the face of death. It’s the only option in an absurd reality.