I am not a fan of Valentine’s Day. Not even of Dragobete (Romanian love feast, the equivalent of Valentine’s Day). I just realized that last year I totally forgot about this celebration. Facebook reminded me this morning what I was doing last year on Valentine’s Day: flying to Birmingham. Now I see that it was exactly on Dragobete. Dragobete kiss girls! Whatsoever… All my Valentine’s Day/Dragobete attempts as a teenager (and not only) ended up as a disaster. I’ve noticed over time that women celebrate love according to their relational status of the year. If she is in a relationship, Facebook will be flooding with kisses and hearts, but if Mr. Right is missing from the landscape, there will be thunder and lightning about how these feast days are some purely commercial shit and how she needs love every single day of the year. This year I got from my friends only photos with messages like “Surprise your girlfriend on this Valentine’s Day, present her to your wife!”, a sign that the excess of love these days do not impress them anymore. 🙂

In the intergalactic world of today, we have celebration days for almost everything: the day to celebrate love, the day to celebrate books, the mother language day, the day’s day, the night’s day… Everything we fail to appreciate during the 364 days of the year, it must be appreciated on the 365th day. My daughter came home from school on Valentine’s Day very sad because she did not receive any card from any boy, while her colleagues got small gifts and Valentine cards. Beware of not having a boyfriend on Valentine’s Day or ignoring this huge event and you will be immediately declared a frustrated person, with serious problems requiring endless cognitive-emotional therapy.

The legend of Dragobete, the son of Baba Dochia, is beautiful, but the idyllic tradition of Dragobete is a little difficult to apply in our days. In the past, “the hills of the village lit fires and around them stood and spoke boys and girls. At noon, the girls were returning running to the village, followed by one of the boys which had fallen in love with them. If the boy was fast enough and caught the girl he liked, she was kissing him in front of everybody. Hence the expression Dragobete kiss girls!. This kiss signified the engagement for one year or even more, being an opportunity to show their love to the community.”* Today, a boy and a girl are kissing a million times and still do not get engaged. The engagement is simply out of fashion! 🙂

I have nothing against a bunch of flowers, but these two feasts of love (especially the one imported from the US) became a business opportunity that traders do not hesitate to use. I do appreciate a few nice words or beautiful flowers on these days, instead of silly soft hearts China imported, dozens of red roses imported from Nederlands and hypocrisy. Otherwise, as a Romanian songwriter said, “where there’s no love, there’s nothing.” I am actually waiting for our Romanian Babele and mucenici. 🙂 You can read about the tradition of Babele and about mucenici here. Be careful today, I heard Dragobete is really kissing all the girls!

*the text between quotation marks is from www.wikipedia.org