Simple St. Valentine's Day

This is my ideal Valentine's Day gift: A handmade card with an original poem from my sweetheart! What a terrific example of simple and elegant living.

Valentine's Day is an interesting holiday, wrapped in mythology. One involves St. Valentine, the priest who was executed by Claudius II during the waning days of the Roman Empire. His crime was secretly performing banned marriages and trying to convert soldiers to Christianity. Years later, Pope Gelasius I  created St. Valentine's Day to commemorate him. I used to think this may be the first truly original Christian holiday, as Christmas and Easter were co-opted pagan holidays celebrating the winter solstice and beginning of spring. But the Romans had a bizarre festival, Lupercalia, that was celebrated in mid-February (featuring Cupid), so the Pope apparently superimposed yet another religious holiday upon a pagan festival.

All that's ancient history, today we drop the St. and now Valentine's Day is the second largest consumer-binge holiday (Christmas is #1).

Given the success in marketing 'Black Friday' to us as the great obligatory Christmas shopping holiday, I assume businesses are pressuring Congress to move the MLK holiday to February and market that as 'Dream Monday' to juice up the Valentine's Day shopping. I suppose President's Day could be moved up a week, perhaps that's more appropriate because presidents are spendthrift role models.

The Internet has a counter-cultural outlet for everything, including conscientious objectors to Valentine's Day consumerism. Here's a rather humorous graphic, ironic given the huge amount of junk we import from a nominally communist China:

Many presents we buy to celebrate Valentine's Day, such as flowers, chocolate and jewelry have astoundingly grotesque origins.

• Most of the flowers in the US come from Columbia and Ecuador, and the global marketplace demands efficiency above all else. That generally results in poor working conditions and unsustainable use of resources. Africa performs the same function for Europe.
• The child slave labor associated with chocolate is well documented despite an ongoing half-hearted effort to address it. Buying chocolate without regard to its source is unconscionable once you learn about common industry practices.
• The diamond industry has been an environmental and labor disaster for as long as I can remember; the current subject of conflict diamonds is just one of many horrors. Gold and precious metal mining is rife with labor and environmental exploitation, to the extent that it's hardly newsworthy anymore. 

It's encouraging that information on the evil side of these industries is readily available and as we the people become more aware, we can vote with something more valuable than a ballot - our dollars. That's a path to a more lovely St. Valentine's Day.