Forever In My Heart on Valentine’s Day

Valentine's Day, that festival between Christmas and Easter, has become, next to Christmas, the most expensive holiday/festival in American life.

The amount of money spent on those outrageously priced greeting cards and the even more atrociously priced gourmet chocolates, not to mention flowers costing enough to start one's own greenhouse, have often become a substitute for human words that cost nothing except a tug on the heart of the sender. "Roses are red, violets are blue..." may tell us something about Botany,but not much about how we feel about a mother, father, child, wife, husband, etc... It isn't what cards, flowers and chocolates say to a friend or loved one, it's what they don't say that has transformed the day created in memory of the martyr St. Valentine, to a 'card day' instead of a "I know the sacrifices you've made for me," or "Through all these years you've been the one steady strength for me" or "I have so much pride in you I can hardly contain it" day.

This doesn’t mean I won't send some symbol of hearts or Cupid with his little spears, but with those symbols I will send along my personal thought to family and friends that they are loved, appreciated, remembered, cherished and are forever in my heart as "the sun of my soul." With or without a card or flowers when we care enough to send the very best, we send ourselves, writ by hand.