Note To Self
If you want to get a kid excited about Valentine's Day, don't tell him it's about love. Don't even bother explaining about all the pink and red, or the hearts or the pretty cards. These things won't so much as raise an eyebrow.
Instead, tell him it's about candy. C-A-N-D-Y. Period.
After all, you yourselves remember class parties and Valentine's Day as a child. For the first decade or so of his life, this is the truth; the only obviously logical reason for creating another holiday. Makes me think on the way C.S. Lewis related understanding chocolate at one age and sex at another to our vague grasp on Heaven. Yes, you heard me: Chocolate. Sex. Heaven.
See for yourselves:
I think our present outlook might be like that of a small boy who, on being told that the sexual act was the highest bodily pleasure should immediately ask whether you ate chocolates at the same time. On receiving the answer 'No', he might regard absence of chocolates as the chief characteristic of sexuality. In vain would you tell him that the reason why lovers in their carnal raptures don't bother about chocolates is that they have something better to think of. The boy knows chocolate: he does not know the positive thing that excludes it. We are in the same position. We know the sexual life; we do not know, except in glimpses, the other thing which, in Heaven, will leave no room for it.
And isn't it funny that we've combined the highest pre-adult bodily pleasure with the highest adult bodily pleasure and made a holiday out of it? It's like a holiday for the senses cleverly disguised as a holiday for the heart. Just one Endorphin-packed flesh fest, filled with all kinds of sensuous pleasures.
I know my husband well enough to know that if I shared this last sentence aloud with him, I would get one of his perfected one-word responses that says it all: sweet!
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I love you, Shaun!
Happy Valentine's Day, all!
