Thursday, February 11, 2010

Be my valentine

Valentine's Day has never been one of those big-deal holidays for me. In my personal ranking of holidays, I place it between New Year's Eve, which I not-so-secretly dislike, and Labor Day, which involves zero celebration but does merit a day off.

Ranking holidays sounds like an interesting activity, but I'll have to save it for another time. Perhaps I'll be rewarded with a marshmallow for my ability to delay such fun. Where oh where will I place Arbor Day???

Back to V Day. Prior to B, I spent the vast majority of Valentine's Days as a single lass. I felt obligated to publicly diss the holiday but didn't care that much. (Or so it seems now. If you had asked me then, I might have offered a lonelier response.)

For our first V Day, I bought a couples French cooking lesson for B and me. I thought an activity together might be more memorable than a gift. And it was. While making souffles, we learned how to break cream. It wasn't part of the class; we just overboiled the light cream. Lesson learned: When in doubt about your ability to regulate heat, choose heavy cream, which is practically indestructible.

After our cooking adventure, we took the more traditional gift-giving route for subsequent V Days, but this year I wanted to find another activity that we could do together.

I wasn't interested in going back for another cooking lesson. I booked a night away at a quaint town we'd visited while attending a wedding and wanted to explore more, but I decided I'd rather visit during warmer weather, so I cancelled. I considered another trip to NYC, but again, the weather inspired me to save my pennies for a better time. Any warm location would require flights and wouldn't fit into the V Day budget.

B suggested seeing a show, so I looked around, found a promising jazz performance, and bought tickets for this upcoming weekend. We're also going to a museum that neither of us has visited.

It will be a low-key Valentine's Day but I am looking forward to it.

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