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All for Love
A satirical Valentine's Day Gift Guide

by Jay Black

Sometime around 11 p.m. on Christmas Day, gremlins emerge from the ceilings of every CVS, Target, and Costco in South Jersey and quietly switch all the decorations and sale displays from elves and tinsel to hearts and chocolate.

You can feel the changeover as you walk into the store, like Luke Skywalker looking at a Super Star Destroyer and sensing Vader’s presence. The red and pink streamers, the boxes of chocolate and the Reese’s Peanut Butter Hearts all form a choir, singing one, loud, ominous song at you: It’s Valentine’s Day and you better have a good gift.

See, in an ideal world, one built on reason and logic, Valentine’s Day would be situated somewhere in summer, safely distant from Christmas. But we don’t live in an ideal world. We live in a chaotic nightmare dimension, where the mercury-drunk calendar designers, in a fit of cosmic insanity, decided to place the hardest, easiest-to-mess-up gift-giving holiday a scant seven weeks after the biggest gifting day of the year.

Madness!

It’s even worse in my house. My wife has a January birthday, which means I cartwheel directly from Christmas to birthday to Valentine’s Day. We call that stretch of the calendar “Dead Man’s Curve.”

You can rant all you want against Valentine’s Day as a phony, corporate invention, dreamed up by an enterprising Whitman’s Sampler salesman as a way to move all the chocolate that didn’t sell at Christmas, but that won’t get you anywhere.

The fact is, if you’re in a relationship, you’re going to be expected to buy not just a gift, but a meaningful symbol of your feelings.

That’s a lot of pressure to put on a stuffed animal you bought at a Rite Aid on the way over to your date’s apartment.

So, with that in mind, I’ve put together an easy-to-follow guide for buying a Valentine’s Day gift.

No. 1: Do not buy a stuffed animal at Rite Aid on your way over to your date’s apartment. If you read that line and thought it was a good idea, your best bet might be to hit yourself in the head with a ball-peen hammer and spend Valentine’s Day in a coma. You can try again next year.

No. 2: Decide on a budget. The actual dollar amount will vary from person to person, but a good rule of thumb is that if you can comfortably afford the gift, you probably didn’t spend enough. A proper afternoon of shopping for Valentine’s Day should feel exactly like a medieval blood-letting: you should leave it woozy and weak.

No. 3: If you’re thinking, well, maybe I’ll save some money and make my partner a gift, go get that ball-peen hammer previously mentioned. Unless you’re a master woodworker or Picasso, your significant other doesn’t want you cutting out construction paper hearts with a pair of safety scissors. The couples on the covers of your grandma’s romance novels don’t look at each other that way because one made the other a macaroni necklace.

No. 4: Try to get an idea of what your partner wants. You can do this several ways, but I have found the easiest, most effective way is to hire a private detective to follow them around for a few weeks, rummaging through their trash, bugging their lunch conversations and descending from the ceiling, Mission: Impossible style, to see what catalogs they’ve left open on the bed.

No. 5: If your partner sends you a text saying, “Hey, this Valentine’s Day, let’s save money and not get each other anything,” understand that it could be a trap. To find out if they really mean it, use the very simple trick of finding a Soviet-era Kremlinologist to pour over every inflection and emoji of your date’s text and then write you a 30,000-word white paper on whether they actually meant it or not. And then, whatever that paper says, buy the present anyway.

If all these tricks fail, and you’re still unsure how to proceed, you could do what I’m doing this year and be honest about your feelings. You could tell them that love songs on the radio didn’t make sense until you met them. That being with them makes you feel like a puppy napping next to the fire on a winter’s day: warm, safe and happy. That a Valentine’s Day gift could only ever be a shadow on Plato’s wall, two dimensional and cold compared to the roaring inferno of your love.

I’m sure they’ll like that a lot more than any gift!

(NOTE: Jay showed an early draft of this column to his wife and was very shortly thereafter taken to the emergency room with a ball-peen hammer-related injury. She told us that the entire column should be rewritten to read: “Just get them diamonds.”)


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Published and copyrighted in South Jersey Magazine, Volume 21, Issue 10 (January 2025)

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