Blogging about Valentine’s Day is exceptionally easy when you’ve really only had one Valentine (and dated them for five years). However, I’ll go on the record and tell all of you in my class, BE ECONOMIC ABOUT VALENTINE’S DAY WHEN YOU’RE ENGAGED!!! My fiance and I are starting to figure out that life is expensive when you start planning and doing everything together. This year, I gave her a Barnes & Noble Giftcard so she could pick out a new case for her Nook, and some flowers. She gave me a small and fairly inexpensive box of chocalate strawsberries and apple slices. Where as in past years we might have gone the extra effort to make sure we find that “perfect” gift for each other, we now realize that the most important gift is just spending time together and being happy with each other.
It’s hard to decide on the best and worst gifts I’ve ever recieved, because they’ve all been consistently good. Lexi, my fiance, always goes out of her way when it comes to buying me gifts on holidays and my birthday, even though I never ask for anything. A couple of years ago, she got me a bag full of my favorite candies, and treated me to dinner followed by a massage, so I have to say that was a really good gift. If I absolutely had to name a bad gift, it would be the chocolate fruits this year. It’s not that the present itself was bad (I rather enjoyed it haha), but we had a very busy day. I had to work all day, then she had to work, then she had meetings while I had errands to run. To top it all off, she had arranged for the fruits to be ready at 3:00, when we were going to have time to exchange presents, and instead, they weren’t ready until 5:30, when she had to go to another meeting. So I ended up picking up my present. By then, we were running late to our Valentine’s dinner, and didn’t get to eat much. Even then, we weren’t really upset about anything, it’s just not the typical romantic day you generally plan for Valentine’s Day. Still, we were happy.
I’ve given her some good gifts as well. I messed myself up early though because for our first Valentine’s Day, I went to Build-A-Bear, and made her a little stuffed football player bear (complete with a name, birth certificate, jersey…), and wrote her a long mushy love letter. Little did I know that four years later, I would be scratching my head trying to come up with stuff because I set the bar high righ away.
Even if I ever did get something I didn’t like, I could never bring myself to let Lexi know, or at least I try not to. Somehow, she always knows when I’m indecisive about something. I guess when you date someone long enough, you pick up on their manorisms, their subtle habits, and you can tell when they’re not 100% on something. I’m the same way to her though. I can always tell when she’s upset, or maybe isn’t entirely excited about something.
If I worked for a business that specialized in Valentine’s gifts, I would try to draw customers simply by putting my business’s name out more than an opponent does their’s. I think on Valentine’s Day, people don’t worry so much about brands as much as they do immediacy. They want to get the flowers before all the good ones are taken, they want to get the candy before the lines are long, they want to make reservations before everyone else, and they want to do it all before traffic is bad. I think by advertising more, my client would grab more peoples’ attention, and therefore receive more customers without having to offer bigger deals and discounts.
