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When I drove past a house decorated to perfection with fancy hearts dangling from the eaves and red and white lights strung along the frame, I wondered where I was when Valentine's Day became such a glorified holiday. Back in the day, people exchanged cards and gifts with that special someone. Nobody ever thought to decorate their house or put up a Valentine tree!

I have no recollection of my parents celebrating the holiday when I was a kid, but I do remember the excitement I felt getting ready for the Valentine's party at school. Mothers volunteered to bake cupcakes and cookies, while others brought those little candy hearts with the words, BE MINE engraved on them.

I learned at a very young age not to wait until the last minute to buy Valentine's cards for my classmates, or all the best ones would be gone. I'd end up having to settle for a package of superheroes, instead of little cupids shooting love darts at each other.

After the cards were purchased, the next step was to find an old shoe box to decorate. My mother helped me cover my box with tin foil and then I'd cut out a bunch of red and white hearts, made out of crepe paper, and glue them all over it. It didn't look half bad, except where the Elmer's glue hardened, making the paper all stiff in places. When the box was decorated, we cut a slot in the lid, and I'd cross my fingers, hoping that Bobby, the boy I had a crush on, would put something extra special inside. Then I would carefully sort through my Valentine's cards, and pick out the perfect one for each classmate, saving the prettiest one for Bobby.

Looking back, I can only imagine how awkward the boys felt. They hadn't even hit puberty, hated girls, yet were forced to comply with putting their name on a dumb card with love written all over it, and then sticking it in some girl's box. After all, in elementary school, didn't all girls have cooties? And I wonder how they felt about giving cards to their buddies, please be my valentine, from your friend, Charlie.

By the time I got to high school, the decorated Valentine box disappeared, but the boys conformed to a new set of rules. Somehow, they had to come up with the money to buy something extra special, because a girl's social status now depended on whether or not she walked down the hall between classes with a single red stemmed rose, or flaunting a huge white Teddy Bear with a red heart sewn on its chest. I remember some girls anxiously scrambling around the first week of February, trying to find

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