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Valentine's Day has come and gone and I didn't get any flowers! I have never gotten any flowers from my husband, and we've been together for ten years. Not very romantic, you might say. On the contrary, my husband has found a most creative way to tell me he loves me.

Shortly after we met, I commented that I had noticed he never bought me flowers. I wasn't really complaining, after all he was treating me like a Goddess in every other way. Still, I wanted to let him know that I would be open to getting flowers every now and then. And this is the story he told me.

My husband had met his first wife during the Vietnam conflict, when he was stationed in Thailand. The first time he bought her flowers, she burst into tears and said, "You want me to die!" He told me he didn't realize that, in her culture, people usually only gave flowers when someone died. It was not used as a romantic gesture at that time, although Valentine's Day is a big holiday there now. According to an article on the website, Things Asian, Thailand is "madly in love with Valentine's Day" and roses are a very popular gift. But this was not the case when they met, and he stopped buying her flowers. And because of the trauma of the whole incident, he found it very difficult to buy flowers for any woman after that.

Now I was in a dilemma. I liked to get flowers, but had never been with a man that liked to give them. My first husband considered them extravagant. So my current husband came up with a beautiful idea; instead of flowers he gives me fairy figurines.

I love collecting fairies. They are beautiful to look at and represent my connection to the fairyland, which started when I was a child and my mother read the Wizard of Oz books to me. There are all kinds of fairies, Flower Fairies, Elemental Fairies, Seasonal Fairies, Good and Bad Fairies, as well as Elves, Gnomes and Dwarves. I have quite a collection of gnomes as well.

So began our tradition. On special occasions or for significant events, I get a new fairy. Sometimes I pick them out myself, and sometimes it is a surprise. After ten years together, I have several bookshelves full of colorful fairies. Many of them have particular meaning to me. For instance, there is the fairy that I received after having breast surgery. I have a fairy riding on a squirrel and one riding a unicorn. I have a gnome riding on a goose, as well.

I also have a wood nymph, a holly fairy, a sea fairy and an earth fairy. Some sit on mushrooms, some on flower petals. One sits on a park bench. There are even little baby fairies. Each is special is her own way, and each is a reminder of how much my husband loves me. For unlike flowers, they do not wilt and die, but provide me with pleasure and happiness each day. And I love watching the puzzlement on the faces of the sales clerks when my husband goes into a store and says, "I'm looking for flowers for my wife." We both know he means fairies, but they are clueless how to help him until we explain our tradition.

Let me see, I have a birthday coming up. Perhaps I should start making suggestions for the type of "flower" I want this year.

"I have a feeling that childhood has been robbed of a great deal of its joys by taking away its belief in wonderful, mystic things, in fairies and all their kin. It is not surprising that when children are grown, they have so little idealism or imagination"...~Laura Ingalls Wilder

Source: "Thailand madly in love with Valentine's Day" Things Asian
http://www.thingsasian.co m/stories-photos/2340

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