Valentine's Day: Prostitution and Capitalism

Valentine's Day has always puzzled and quite frankly, annoyed me (and before you say I'm a bitter un-loved woman I am happily engaged actually, but still detest the holiday). It's a day where men go out and buy some token of love, the price of which is based on how much money that he makes (same can be said of engagement rings as well, but that's a whole other story). I mean let's think about it, it's really all about evolution: the necessity to mate drives them to to please the females, so that the females might be more willing towards the males advances. To put it bluntly, buy Valentine day's crap for women and the women return the favor with sexual acts. This sort of exchange of material goods for sex is on every other day of the year known as prostitution.

The name of this "Holiday" comes from St. Valentine (which is shared by 14 people who the Catholic Church saw fit to canonize, 3 of which died on February 14th.) One was priest in Rome during the persecution of Christians during the reign of Claudius II, one was a bishop of the town known today as Terni and the third one was killed somewhere in Northern Africa, where he was apparently spreading the word of God to an unwilling audience. So based on this information we are commemorating the day when three men called Valentine met their end, mostly like through some really unpleasant way. Um... what does that have to do with a day that's supposed to be all about love? (and yes I'm fully aware of the  Lupercalia which once again comes back to the idea of prostitution)

My answer: Capitalism. It's one of those holidays that seem to exist only to provide people with an excuse to buy stuff, much like most holiday's when all the shops are closed have no religious meaning at all to most of us, but suddenly the unions become hard line fundamentalist Christians when it comes to days of from work (though hell, I'm not opposed to a day off of work) Personally, I think the marketing industries have left several really juicy holidays to exploit. What about Ramadan; I mean that's a whole month! Once again that's a whole other topic.

Overall St. Valentine's day doesn't make any sense to me and it never has for that matter. Why do we need a special day to celebrate love and friendship, when everyday should be a celebration of our love towards one another? Furthermore if this day really is in fact a "Holiday" why isn't it celebrated on the Federal level? We get off other holidays like president's day and that doesn't even involve chocolate! The only good this about this day: the day after when chocolate and other candies go on sale.