When IS the St Valentine's Day Massacre? Oh, That's Right: EVERY St Valentine's Day
Make no mistake, there's a reason the color scheme for this love dream is red, red, red...
Holidays are useful for all sorts of things. To match us to significant seasons. To the significance of the seasons. As timekeepers and, generally, as a means to stamp some order across the face of the chaos that most of us will fail to admit constitutes our lives.
And the tone and timbre of the seasons and the holidays that mark them tells volumes about our interests and priorities. Most significantly though, this notion: just because they’re holidays doesn’t mean they all deserve celebrations. In fact this is a killer error to make, and one you’re more than likely to make, but for me, here, now, to “help” you NOT make it? Yeah, that’s the jam.
Which is to say, between the rhymes, reasons, holiday seasons are minefields full of destructive intent. Presidents’ Day, Labor Day, Veterans Day, and Martin Luther King Day?
Of course not. These are political tells what with their placements along the not-so-invisible political spectrum. But these are largely “who cares?” holidays.
So, not those. I’m talking about the ones hiding in plain sight and more dangerous because of this. To wit: Thanksgiving, Christmas (Hanukkah is exempt here), New Year’s Eve, all undeniably set you up for the kill stroke that can only routinely and regularly be delivered by, the just passed St. Valentine’s Day.
The fact that I’m writing this now, and you’re reading this now, means you, and I, have made it through. None the worse for wear? Maaayyyyabbbeee.
Have you ever bought your mother-in-law a sex toy for Christmas (true story drawn from the sex column I used to write…and something which I have never forgotten that someone did)? Well, someone did. How he expected that to play out, I have no idea…
“The only holiday we ever celebrated was Thanksgiving.” She had been raised Jehovah’s Witness. Not casually. Full on. Dragged door to door by first grandparents and then parents. To spread the good word. But no birthday celebrations. No Christmas. No nothing. Presumably the reason being it detracted from G-d. But Thanksgiving? “Well, it was just a family meal with a focus on what G-d’s given us.”
If only the rest of us had that kind of message discipline, especially those of us that hate Thanksgiving for the amount of enforced family time it entails. Me? I LOVE the holiday but I’m fortunate enough to LOVE my family.
Given the amount of complaining around it though, well, it seems Thanksgiving masks the very real peril of the holiday that immediately follows it as most of us don’t ever see it coming.
Yeah, Christmas, like the Christ after who it is named, is a problem. Outsized expectations sitting at a juncture with unfulfilled desires, holiday music insisting that everything is both holly and jolly, enforced family time (this again) and the corrosive aftereffects of commerce and capitalism. Christmas can be a killer.
For me? Nooooooo…I love it. Again: see my aforementioned love of family.
But for many it is hell. And here is where we can start to sharpen the point: specifically for those in romantic relationships. Because the gifts you get speak volumes about how much attention your partner is paying to you and what you’re creating (note: a vacuum cleaner as a gift will get you nowhere) together. Good gifts are just that, good, but bad gifts can suddenly shine the harshest of lights on just what the hell you two have been doing anyway.
Not just for “loving” couples either. Have you ever bought your mother-in-law a sex toy for Christmas (true story drawn from the sex column I used to write…and something which I have never forgotten that someone did)? Well, someone did. How he expected that to play out, I have no idea, but it played out badly enough that he wrote me for advice (my advice: only give dildos as gifts if you’re prepared to watch the user use them).
“Irish men are so out of touch with their sexuality.” She spoke, out loud, of her partner, who sat on the other end of the couch, not more than five feet from where she was confiding to me. “Let’s just say if brevity is the spirit of wit, Irish men are VERY witty.”
For shits and giggles though, assume your relationship has made it through/past Christmas… to New Year’s Eve. Mostly because it is a party, and a party that routinely involves alcohol, New Year’s Eve is the silent killer. Expensive, dangerous and highly unlikely to yield any long term memories of any significant value — the last one I remembered I remember only because I was not in a couple and was fortunate enough to not have died when in a drunken state I had ridden a Big Wheel down a hill in Harlem almost into traffic — it can ruin the sturdiest of relationships.
“Irish men are so out of touch with their sexuality.” She spoke, out loud, of her partner, who sat on the other end of the couch, not more than five feet from where she was confiding to me. “Let’s just say if brevity is the spirit of wit, Irish men are VERY witty.”
I chuckled. Uncomfortably.
“But…YOU!” A la Snaggletooth from the Hanna-Barbera cartoon of the same name, this was all that was needed to, um, exit, stage right. My last view of them, and their tear-stained faces on opposites ends of what now seemed like a very long couch, was of them downing what remained of their sixth bottle of wine that evening.
“Happy” New Year’s indeed.
Did you make it past all of those mines in that relationship minefield? Good, and even better for youse two to have made it through that holiday troika of terror. Now, take it easy, eh? Smooth sailing, right?
WRONG.
You see they say it’s the punches that you don’t see coming that are the worse and Valentine’s Day is that punch. Your choice of gifts/experiences if not on, are then liable to be so very, very off. Moreover, if you’re of a deeply philosophical bent, is it even possible that you could fake your way through having this day be anything other than truly heartfelt?
Yeah, only the truly cynical can pull this off and the price to be paid to be this cynical is having to be this cynical. Like…all the time. Look, see, and track, if you can, how many couples are claimed by the coup de grâce of the gentlest but most merciless of relationship killers. Here’s my unofficial estimate…every one.
If you’re single but coupled and not moving toward matrimony? You’re dead. If you’re married and think you’re going to get away with that “it’s just so commercial” rebop, guess again. Any number of things can, and will happen, but what won’t happen? What won’t happen is you comfortably ignoring St. Valentine’s Day and expecting to not be touched by the terrible tendrils of your idleness.
It requires thought, planning and all of what constitutes real. Which is where the old Hollywood adage comes in, just to make things more difficult: “sincerity is everything…but once you can fake that, you’ve got it made!”
That is to say…opportunity has 1000 faces. And you’ll need almost all of them to make them by the Four Estates of Holiday Horror (claiming more dead than anything that ever happened on the 4th of July). That’s the bad news.
The good news? If you made it this far, in America at the very least, you’re set until Thanksgiving.
Whew. True love…ageless and evergreen as Barbra Streisand would say. Perfect.
And if books are still your thing and you still do books, please do this one…the memoir A Walk Across Dirty Water and Straight Into Murderer's Row, from Amazon…Or the Bookshop.Org dealie: Here?
And if you’d like to book a book show? Please DM.
