The Virtues of Making Our Valentines

Our house is being overrun by Flamingos. 

As much as I would love to say it’s the sign of an early spring thaw that sends them migrating our way, I can’t.   The whole leggy flock of them is of the pepto-bismo pink pipe cleaner and stock paper sort. 

In our house, February has always been a month of letter writing and card making. . . which means January is a month of busy weekends.   Sometime within the second weekend of the year we begin the process by choosing a design and message for our Valentines.  The third weekend we make a list of people we would like to send them to and buy all of the supplies.  By the end of January we start to assemble them, and finally the weekend before V-Day, they’re signed, sealed, and ready to be delivered. 

After four years, I’m happy to report we’ve almost got the logistics down to the science of a NASA shuttle launch.  Not that our kitchen resembles anything like Mission Control during the process . . . which is why the card making enterprise remains fun, and quite honestly, continues to be done. 

The design for this year’s pink ladies came from a Junior Ranger issue Miss S received last May.  She saved it in the top drawer of her bedside table for nine months in anticipation of being able to use it for this year’s Valentines.  When the season finally came upon us, she was ready. 

The first finished flamingo.
(Say that three times fast!)

It was probably due to those months of anticipation that she worked so diligently these past weeks.   Without a single complaint at any point in the process, she came up with a message and typed it on the computer, formed all the little legs and necks, cut out all the beaks, and put all the pieces together.  Now that her handiwork is done, the two hearts of each bird’s body are sandwiching its pink pipe cleaner feet and neck.  Peeping out from the top is its black billed beak and a googly eye.  Each and every one is ready to be passed on to the friend or loved one it was made for.

Despite our harried lives, we continue to make them by hand.  I could say that we do this because of the benefits it has for developing Miss S’s  creativity, coordination, or analytic skills, but I have to be honest — those ‘practical benefits’ aren’t major motivators.  I remain committed to creating homemade greeting cards for Valentine's Day out of the knowledge that in doing it, we are participating in an ancient and at the same time timeless tradition.

An Edwardian Valentine, circa 1900

It is popularly noted that the tradition of exchanging greeting cards for Valentine’s Day dates back to the 1400s on the European continent, and that the modern greeting card industry was developed by Englishman Sir Henry Cole in 1850.  Cole, notably, saw the commercial greeting card as a practical efficiency in a culture where every social relationship was mediated by letters.  A lady could spend up to three or four hours a day in correspondence—to her travelling husband, distant family members, friends and acquaintances in transit, individuals within the parish, her absent children.  A huge percentage of the labor involved in running a large household was simply wrapped up in the processes of writing.

  


The Chinese characters for 'Blessing'

My motivation for creating these cards goes even farther back than these European traditions however, to those of the ancient Chinese. Nearly two thousand years ago, the Chinese were already exchanging hand written greetings with family and friends at the turn of every New Year.  They did so in order to ward off bad fortune.  Like the ancient Egyptians, the Chinese believed that words, once inscribed, were a sacred engine of reality.  To write out in a gentle hand a blessing to a loved one was — by the very act of inscribing it — to manifest that blessing and bestow it on the receiver.    

I like to think that a little of everything we put into and onto these Valentines every year — everything that we inscribe them with — creates a little of the transcendent goodness that the ancient Chinese believed their New Year’s greetings bestowed on their loved ones.  And I’d like to believe that someday Miss S. will feel the same, long after this year’s flock of flamingos has migrated on.