Celebrating Valentine’s Day with Children

It’s officially been a month since Christmas and I still have the Christmas decorations on my front porch. Excuse me a minute while I take those down and change up my seasonal decor….

This week I’m going to take a break from my weekly virtues book recommendations to talk about another one of my favourite topics – rituals.

When the calendar turns to January each year, I usually make New Year’s Resolutions. Usually my resolutions involve overhauling or fine-tuning my routine in some way. Cooking healthier, exercising more, and staying on top of the laundry. I love a good routine. Routines make my life manageable. But ritual makes it meaningful. Ritual celebrations, like Valentine’s Day, are like sprinkles that make the humdrum of daily life more memorable. During the pandemic, every day felt the same. I don’t remember a ton of the daily monotony of that time period – but I do remember some of the more special moments.

Dimitris Xygalatas, author of Ritual, writes

“While habits help us organize important tasks by routinizing them and making them mundane, rituals imbue our lives with meaning by making certain things special.”

Dimitris Xygalatas, Ritual, p.7

It’s nice to have something to look forward to in February. Easter is so far away, summer vacation is even further. So I get excited about Valentine’s Day. I have completed my austere January of rest and recovery after the holiday season, and I am ready for some more sprinkles by mid-February. But also, I don’t have a lot of time or energy to cut cheese into heart shapes, make my own fortune cookies, or make papier maché pickles…

And now that I have two kids and neither of them nap, I don’t have time for this cute photoshoot either, which I did – 7 years ago when my son was a little baby. He didn’t yet protest wearing anything other than a t-shirt and sweatpants and he would stay sitting where I plunked him down. Ahhh the simplicity of those days!

I’m a busy mom and these days I need some easier sprinkles to make the day feel special.

But first!

You know how much I love researching the crap out of something so allow me to share with you a Short History of Valentine’s Day.

It is thought that the roots of Valentine’s Day go back to the Roman holiday of Lupercalia, which was held in Mid-February every year. Lupercalia was named for “lupus” meaning wolves and referenced wild wolves that roamed Europe thousands of years ago. The Romans believed that a God protected their herds from these wild wolves and they held a festival to honor this God and celebrate fertility.

Later, it was noticed that some bird species often choose their springtime mates around this time of the year and the festival evolved into one where Romans also chose their mates – by giving their sweethearts gifts and love letters. However, this festival did not officially become the celebration of love and romance until the 14th century. There were several Christian martyrs named Valentine – and there are different legends associated with each. One more common one is that one of these St. Valentines defied orders and secretly married couples so that the wedded husbands would be spared from war. Written Valentines started being exchanged in the 1500s. Often these exchanged messages featured hearts, Cupid – the Roman God of love, or birds -all three significant in the history of Valentine’s Day.

This holiday is steeped in ancient history. If there’s one thing my anthropology- nerd self loves more than researching, it is feeling connected to humanity across time and space. I also love to celebrate love! There is so much sadness and anger and hatred in the world. It’s nice to spend a day telling the people in your life how much you care about them. Even if it does make Hallmark a lot of money. I’m going to ignore that part and take on the role of “sprinkle-bearer” to imbue our year with more significance.

Valentine’s Day

As homeschoolers, we don’t really have a school-organized Valentines exchange among the kids. We still fill out a few for our neighbors, but I wanted a simple ritual to do on Valentine’s day that felt more meaningful for my family than exchanging little bits of paper. I’ve tried different things over the year but nothing really felt “right” or it was frankly too much effort for me. Last year, I settled on a new tradition worth repeating.

Photo Gift

In the book, Atomic Habits, James Clear writes about bundling a habit you want to start with one that you already have established to help you remember the new habit. For example, I always make a cup of tea when I wake up. When I wanted to start emptying the dishwasher in the morning instead of waiting until the dirty dishes pile up all over the kitchen, I decided to bundle emptying the dishwasher with boiling the kettle for my morning cup of tea. Boil kettle, empty dishwasher. Bundled.

So I took this wisdom and applied it in a different context.

Growing up, we had lots of photo albums that I enjoyed pouring through, but in the age of iPhones, I had several thousand photos on my phone and backed up into the cloud that my kids couldn’t just look at whenever they wanted to. I had done a few print runs of 4×6 photos to stick in an album for them to look through, but it was haphazard and I’d go several years between updating these albums. I decided I would bundle my desire to add to our family’s printed and accessible-to-kids photo albums with my desire to do something meaningful for Valentines day. Last year, I ordered a bunch of 4×6 prints from the previous year. I wrapped them up and gifted them to my kids for Valentine’s day. We spent time that day looking through the photos and sliding them into the family albums. Having the deadline of Feb 14th each year to get these photos printed means I get it done. And spending time on Valentine’s Day as a family looking through our year of photos is meaningful and special. It was also affordable. Last year Shutterfly did free 4×6 prints and all I had to pay for was the $10 shipping.

Chocolate Shop

Last year we also went to See’s Candies, a fancy chocolate shop I had yet to cross the threshold of out of self-preservation (chocolate is such a weakness for me) and my kids got to choose 6 chocolates each for one another. They didn’t get to choose the chocolates they wanted for themselves – they chose chocolates they thought the other one would like. And then we ate them all pretty much as soon as we got to the car and brought some home for Daddy. I think we will do this again this year. We haven’t been back to See’s since last Valentine’s Day – and one of the perks of homeschooling is we can go in the early afternoon.

Compliment Countdown

A third simple Valentine’s tradition is a compliment countdown for my children. January 31^st, I cut out some hearts out of paper (or purchase a heart-shaped post-it note pad to make it even easier) and I write down 14 things I love about each of my children on them. Then, every morning from February 1^st to February 14^th, my children wake up to a paper heart taped to their door for them to discover and read. Last year, my son was really taking off with his reading and it was great practice for him to read these compliments each day. My kids got so into this morning tradition, they got my husband on the compliment bandwagon too and had him write out nice things to me on hearts for our bedroom door.

Anyways, I hope this post inspires you to think of simple ways you can celebrate this holiday with the people in your life. It doesn’t have to be complicated, time intensive, expensive, or Pinterest-worthy. Just real love shown in real ways for real life.

Happy Valentine’s Day in a couple weeks!

-Heather

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