By: Lora Wimsatt
It seems odd to me now, but somehow when I was a child reading “The Bobbsey Twins: Merry Days Indoors and Out,” it never occurred to me that the book had been written in another era.
Not even with the mention of the servants driving the sleigh, or of going to the country to gather eggs, nor of hopelessly antiquated notions such as the passage when a child fainted while jumping rope, and the father noted “he had heard of more than one little girl dying from too much jumping.”
I was intrigued, however, with what even then seemed such quaint practices as the children gathering around the table (in the sitting room, whatever that was), cutting out lacy designs from colored tissue paper and pictures from magazines to make valentines.
I read with interest of how the children went out in the evening and left valentines on the piazzas of their friends’ homes. I had no idea what a piazza was – even now I can only guess that it is a porch – but it seemed a charming tradition and I wondered why nobody does that anymore.
Valentine’s Day for me as a little child meant cutting out hearts from red construction paper and dropping them, one by one, into small white paper bags we had made earlier in the week, one for each of my classmates.
When I got a little older, the tradition evolved into buying pre-made valentines. I always tried to find a set with puppies. By the time I was grown up and buying valentines for my own children to exchange at school, the whole process had gone mercenary and the only options were various characters from movie or television cartoons, with cheesy messages already printed on them, such as a fairytale princess saying, “Valentine, you deserve the royal treatment!” or a Power Ranger blazing through a graphic of “Ultimate Valentine Power!”
But they were cheap, the kids liked them and I had bigger issues to deal with, like laundry and getting supper on the table and making beds and overseeing homework and letting the dog in, or out, or whichever way he needed to go.
So that was that, but this is now.
And now I’ve got grandchildren, and have lived a few more years in which to accumulate wisdom – or maybe I’ve just gotten fed up with the commercialization of the whole wide world.
So I’ll sweetly suggest to my daughter that perhaps she would like me to take over responsibility of helping my grandgirl with her valentines this year. After all, my daughter has her hands full with laundry and getting supper on the table and making beds …
I don’t have a sitting room, but I do have a table in the kitchen. I don’t have colored tissue, but I do have construction paper. I don’t have paste but I do have good old reliable Elmer’s Glue-All.
I know how to fold red paper in half and cut out the shape into a perfect heart. I know how to trim white paper so it looks like lace. I know how to pleat and ruffle and scrunch and tuck all kinds of pretty patterns and designs.
So this year will be my granddaughter’s first real introduction to Valentine’s Day. Our celebration may not be as nostalgic as that of the Bobbsey Twins. It may not be as slick as my children’s were.
But we will have the magic ingredient that this special day is all about, and that, of course, is love.