School Valentine Exchange

When I was in elementary school, Valentine’s Day was fraught with anxiety. At the end of our school day, we knew we would be exchanging valentines.

Most of the students brought in valentine cards. If your family didn’t supply them, you would be hugely

The valentines we exchanged
aimed at being clever,
but seldom succeeded.

embarrassed, although of course you’d pretend that the entire idea was ridiculous, and you were glad you didn’t bring anything as childish as valentines.

There were a number of reasons why a child might not have valentines. Usually it was due to disorganized or uncaring parents, but sometimes it was a financial burden for a family. In those pre-birth control days, most families in the neighborhood had between four and twelve children.

My family (smack in the middle, with eight children) always purchased valentines for us to distribute. They came in large books, each page with a variety of valentines to cut or punch out.

My father would often be dispatched to Woolworth’s to purchase the books. There were few valentine displaying popular figures, like Mickey Mouse, and they were much more expensive than the more generic ones. My father had an unfortunate tendency to get the ones with smiling red trucks and bulldozers rather than dolls or cupids. That was fine for my brothers, but we girls weren’t happy with it.

They were full of cutesy images.

We would take the list of students in our class, which had been handed out the first week of school, and begin the agonizing decisions on which valentine to send to whom. And trying hard to remember who had joined the class during the year.

Some teachers insisted that anyone who brought valentines bring one for each of the other students. My mother subscribed to this theory, so we always had a valentine for each classmate. And one for the teacher. Since our classes were big, that was often more than forty valentines. Sometimes the book only had thirty six, which left us with a dilemma. We could always make a hand-drawn one for the teacher, who for some reason was never offended by this unprofessional presentation, but the same couldn’t be said for the kids who got them. Was it better to give the home-made ones to your best friends, and explain, or to the popular kids, who wouldn’t pay much attention to what they got from the nobodies like us?

You definitely didn’t want to give them to fellow nobodies who weren’t your particular friends, since you knew how awful it felt to get such rejects.

And if the teacher didn’t insist on the valentine-for-everybody system, you knew you were destined to get maybe three, while other kids got lots more. You’d put on a brave face and shove your three deep in your bookbag, sitting quietly while the more popular kids showed off the ones from their equally popular friends.

As we got older, the whole valentine exchange seemed to lose its importance. Was the day really so important? But I know that there are still people, many of them school children, for whom Valentine’s Day remains a source of stress.

Some of us may take a grim satisfaction in the report by Huffington Post that people who enter into marriage on February 14 are one third more likely to divorce than those married on other days. 

The company that started it all in the U.S.
mass producing commercial valentines.