Alternative Holiday

So, tomorrow night’s the big night. Did you get your special someone a special something? Good for you, P.T. Barnum was right, there’s one of you born every minute. Never has there been a more overly commercialized holiday in America, and Americans know how to over commercialize their holidays.

I’m sorry, maybe it’s because in high school I was always the guy girls’ mothers approved of but the girls themselves all wanted me as “just friends,” but Valentine’s Day always brings out the curmudgeon in me.

What do you think you’re celebrating exactly anyway? A massacre? In Chicago in 1929, seven men from mobster "Bugs" Moran’s gang were lined up against a wall in a garage and riddled with bullets by “Machine Gun" McGurn and other members of Al Capone’s gang. Capone was lounging around lavishly in Florida, while McGun and his boys drove to the garage in a stolen police car and wore police uniforms.

In ancient Rome, February 14th was a holiday to honor Juno, Queen of the Roman gods and godess of marriage. On Juno’s Day the names of Roman girls were written down and placed in jars. Each boy in town would get to draw a girl's name out and would have to be “partners” with that girl during a festival that took place the following week. Emperor Claudius II thought that the reason he had a hard time getting recruits for Rome’s army was that they didn’t want to leave their girls so he cancelled all marriages and engagements.

Saint Valentine was a priest at Rome at the time and secretly married couples. He was arrested and condemned him to death by being beaten with clubs and decapitated. He was executed on February 14th, 270 A.D. What a lovely thing to celebrate with a Hallmark card.

Legend has it that he left a farewell note for his jailer's daughter, and signed it "From Your Valentine". As if! Please, you don’t think some Hallmark junior executive down at their HQ in Kansas City didn’t make that one up?

And what’s up with the whole Cupid thing? He was a Greek god, the son of Venus. Or was it Aphrodite? I can never keep straight what the Romans renamed their Greek gods. Cupid’s other name was Eros- as in erotic. There’s a myth that says he fell in love with a human girl named Psyche, as in your mind, your powers of reason- see this is why I think most Greco-Roman myths were really allegories.

Anyway, I guess Venus was jealous of Psyche’s beauty, and ordered Cupid to punish her. Instead, he fell in love with her and married her. There’s a family that could get on Rikki Lake or Montel Williams! I guess interspecies marriage was a no-no for the gods so as a mortal she was forbidden to look at him, maybe because he looked like a tiny little baby with wings. Who marries someone without ever seeing them? At least they couldn’t say it was love at first sight.

If you’re as irritated with all the cutsie-wootsie ness of this so-called holiday, or if you’re just cynical about throwing all kinds of money into a more-or-less made-up holiday, then I have an alternative for you. Arizona Statehood Day. That’s right, my home-planet became the forty-eighth state on February 14, 1912. Before you poo-poo this idea because you weren’t born there, just consider a few things. Wyatt Erp was from Iowa. You know, shoot-out at the O.K. Coral Wyatt Erp. So, see, our two states have sort of a natural connection. Arizona has produced the likes of Barry Goldwater, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and John McCain, so that should appeal to all the Republicans we have here in Iowa’s Fifth District. And let’s face it, when people decide to retire somewhere warmer than Iowa, where do most of them go? Uh-huh, that’s right, Arid-Zone-a.

What better way to warm you and your sweetie’s hearts than with sunny thoughts of the land of cactus and sand. We could even celebrate with Mexican food and margaritas instead of those stupid candy hearts. You know that spicy food would be just the thing to fight off the February freeze we have to put up with in Iowa. So join me and all my fellow “Zonies” tomorrow by celebrating Arizona Statehood Day instead of that other, out-dated, over commercialized, sappy excuse for a holiday. You’ll be glad you did.

Hold on, before you all start sending my wife sympathy cards, I want you to know that I already got her some very nice, even romantic gifts. She’s covered. Besides, she knows I love her 365 days a year, not just one, like the rest of those saps’ wives who celebrate that OTHER holiday.