I suspect the primary reason for this event was my wife’s inherent enjoyment of holidays, celebrations, and parties – especially when they involved our children. At any rate, at some time in the 1970s our family took advantage of a minor holiday, Valentine’s Day, to initiate a major festival – the Oyler Family Annual Traditional Celebration Of Valentine’s (Day), in honor of which we invented the acronym OFATCOV.
I have a faint recollection of this beginning with the family’s concern about Nan’s Aunt Gladys Powell. Following the death of her sister (Nan’s mother), Gladys had moved into a neat little house in Grove City and appeared to be coping well, until winter set in. And then we learned that she was suffering from “SAD” (Seasonal Affective Disorder), a long bout of depression brought on by “Pittsburgh Grey” skies and continuous cold weather in the months following Christmas. Nan wondered if it would cheer her up to visit us for a few days in the depth of the season. This soon escalated into a much bigger production which included Nan’s sister Betty Shaffer and my mother.
A few days before Valentine’s Day, Betty drove down from Meadville, picking up Gladys in Grove City, and popped into our house full of plans for the holiday. I brought my mother over from Bridgeville and we began to decorate. Our children all immediately remember the house being filled with pink and red banners. They also remember lots of candy (conversation hearts!) and cookies to eat, as well as the unexpected delivery of a plethora of gifts. Nan and I made sure there were appropriate gifts for everyone, at a level approaching a birthday or Christmas. Add to this holiday-quality meals and remarkable inter-family interactions and we had ourselves a legitimate mid-winter festival. It was such a success that we vowed to repeat it each year. At some point someone, probably Betty, came up with the acronym which still brings a smile to the four of us who remember it.
There certainly is considerable precedent for societies inventing mid-winter holidays. Primitive pagans initially recognized the summer and winter solstices and the spring and autumnal equinoxes by celebrations, frequently dedicated to a variety of gods. They enjoyed this so much that they then inserted celebrations at the midpoint between these occasions. In the British Isles the Insular Celts celebrated the midpoint between the winter solstice and spring equinox (February 1) as Imbolc, apparently related to the lambing season, the basis of their agricultural society. Early Christians celebrated Candlemas (February 2) in honor of the presentation of Jesus at the Temple. Medieval Germans added weather prediction to Candlemas Day, a custom that morphed into Groundhog Day in Pennsylvania Dutch country in the eighteenth century. Regardless of the culture, it was easy to invent a holiday to soften the despair of the winter.
St. Valentine’s Day has an interesting evolution. It was promoted by the early church as an alternative to a notorious pagan celebration, Lupercalia. As early as the ninth century it was celebrated by Roman Catholics in commemoration of an early Christian martyr. There are several candidates for his identity, including one whose skull can be seen today at the Basilica of Santa Maria in Rome. The linking of romantic love to the holiday occurred in the fifteenth century, initiating a massive industry that still prospers today. It is reported that 145 million Valentine’s Day cards were sent in 2022, a small fraction of the twenty-four billion dollars spent on the holiday in this country.
My colleagues who attended Washington Grade School in Bridgeville all have identical memories of Valentine’s Day in the 1930s. A temporary post office was set up in the basement and each class in its turn given the opportunity to take advantage of it. It consisted of a series of individual mailboxes, maybe six inches on a side. Each student’s name was written on a specific box, in alphabetical order. We then took turns putting the appropriate valentines into each box. When this was completed, the mailman then delivered the mail to each child. Most of the cards were hand-made from construction paper and signed by the maker; occasionally some of the children from more affluent families would deliver ‘store-bought” cards to the boxes of their favorites. Remarkably, each of us always got at least one valentine from each of our classmates, and saw a minimum of significance in any differences in them.
Another rare occurrence was the delivery of what we called “comic valentines”. These were the antithesis of romantic valentines, often nasty and overly negative. I remember them as being a single eight and a half by eleven sheet with a border around a cartoon character and a four or five line “clever” poem. I certainly remember receiving one accusing me of acting like I thought I was smarter than everyone else. In retrospect, I suspect “the shoe fit”; I don’t recall thinking there was anything comic about it.
The closest I could find to the one I remember is entitled “Egghead”. It has a cartoon of a bespectacled gentleman with the eraser of a pencil protruding from his right ear and the point from his left. Its text follows:
You think you’re pretty brainy You think you’re pretty smart But all your head is good for Is to keep your ears apart!
When I investigated the history of comic valentines, I quickly learned that the custom reached the peak of its popularity in this country in the mid-1850s when sales of comic valentines matched that of romantic ones. In those days they were known as “penny dreadfuls” or “vinegar valentines”. After the Civil War the trend reversed, but vestiges persisted for another seven decades.
I must admit that my best memories of Valentine’s Day were the first few years of OFATCOV when our children were young and those four wonderful ladies were still with us.