Sweet Valentine

Do you remember Valentine’s Day at school? My memories go something like this:
1) Tape paper bag to your desk.
2) Deposit paper cards into the bags of your friends.
3) Cross your fingers that someone puts some cards into your bag.
4) Bliss, as you open the bag later in the day and find, in fact, that you are not a big loser and you actually got a bunch of cards.

Okay, so a couple of things have changed since then. First, I was given a list of the names of all the kids at daycare so I could make sure we sent one for each kid. In this day in age, everyone gets a card from everyone. The second change is that most cards come with candy. So you can substitute steps 3 and 4 above with:
3) Cross you fingers that you get good candy.
4) Bliss, as you open the bag and find it full of chocolate and gummy hearts.

Damn, it’s hard to be a minimalist these days. It’s not that I hate holidays, really I don’t. I just don’t like commercial frenzy. I get it, as a generation of parents, we have a lot of guilt about daycare, work, self indulgence, and not having time, inclination or skills to make homemade stuff. Collectively we’re easy marketing targets, our kids are even more so since they've been marketed to since birth. I just hate to fall into that trap.

I wanted us to make home made cards this year. I think we ended up with two lovely ones but two scribbled all over in black marker, so in the end I sent the kids to school and daycare with a total of 46 garden variety store bought cards. But I put my foot down when it came to adding in Smarties or heart shaped lollipops. I admit to some anxiety about failing on both sides (ie. not being a crafty mom, but not sending candy either) but I did feel some relief when I noticed my kids didn’t know or care who gave them the candy, they were too busy eating it.

I felt way better when I saw how excited my daughter was about making breakfast in bed for me and her dad (one on each day of the weekend). That's the spirit grasshopper!