Happy Black Sunday.

We're all friends here, right? So I'll be frank: I don't have a lot of use for Valentine's Day.

I'm in my sixth decade on this planet. For the first ten years or so, I could count on Valentines from my parents and my classmates (except for the year my teacher ruined Valentine's Day); for another ten years, I was married, and could count on something from the husband. For the remaining three-plus decades, I've been in Valentine limbo -- either wondering whether I'd have a reason to celebrate, or simply waiting for the day after, when Valentine candy would be fifty percent off.

Why do we celebrate this day, anyway? To start with, it was the feast day of a Catholic saint. St. Valentine of Terni, Wikipedia tells me, was a Roman who was martyred on this date in the third century. Or maybe it was two different guys, both named Valentine and martyred in different years. I guess the church records were a little sketchy in those days. In any case, the Catholic church didn't establish February 14th as the feast day of St. Valentine until 496 -- and then the church sort of demoted him in 1969. He's still a saint, but local churches don't have to observe his feast day.

Traditionally, St. Valentine is the patron saint of beekeeping, epilepsy, and bubonic plague. Romantic, no?

It was Geoffrey Chaucer who first connected St. Valentine to romance in his Parliament of Foules. People in the Middle Ages believed that birds paired off in mid-February, according to the Julian calendar; St. Valentine's feast day was the 14th; hey presto, we've got a holiday for love and romance. Some scholars over the centuries since have argued that Valentine celebrations were invented by the church to supersede and replace the pagan celebration of Lupercalia, but that has pretty much been debunked.

Anyway, within the past hundred years or so, Valentine's Day has been commercialized like almost every other holiday -- and like many other holidays, that has led to...oh, let's not beat around the bush here: if you don't have a date on Valentine's weekend, popular culture considers you to be something of a failure.

That's a lot of hooey. There are all sorts of reasons why people might not be paired off on a random day in mid-February. And some people who are paired off likely wish they weren't.

My only suggestion for getting through Valentine's weekend is that we all try to lower our expectations. If you have a date, great. If not, hey, it's one day. Stay away from romantic movies, and ads for flowers and jewelry. It'll all be over tomorrow.

So to those of you who are happily paired off today, happy Valentine's Day. To the rest of you, I'll see you at the drugstore tomorrow for half-price chocolate.

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Here's one bit of cheerful holiday news: I Heard It on the Radio is just 99 cents through next weekend. This anthology has something for everyone -- including a story by me. Consider it our Valentine to you, Dear Reader.

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These moments of black-hearted blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Black Friday tidings (contest alert!).

Image credit: alisafoytik / 123RF Stock Photo

I hate Valentine's Day.

This is not a recent development. When I was in the second grade, my teacher's name was Mrs. Dunkelberger. She wore her iron-gray hair in a bun and ran our classroom with an iron fist. In the run-up to Valentine's Day, she was insistent that everyone not only bring enough valentines for every kid in the class, but that we had to sign the backs of all the cards we were handing out. On the appointed day, after valentines were passed out, another student complained about receiving an unsigned card. Mrs. Dunkelberger's solution was to call a halt to the whole thing. The details are fuzzy -- we may have been required to reclaim all the valentines we'd brought -- but in any case, we had to go back to our regular work instead of having a party.

Granted, it was a long time ago. But that sort of injustice sticks with a person.

Since then, I've come to view Valentine's Day as not just an excuse for florists to triple their prices, but as a sly way to make unattached people feel inadequate. You can always tell the unattached. We're the ones in line at the drugstore on February 15th, buying ourselves the heart-shaped box of chocolates we didn't receive the day before. On the upside, they're half price. On the downside...yeah.

This feeling may or may not have influenced me when I wrote the ending of Fissured. As you may know, that's the book in which Joseph goes walkabout on Valentine's Day without a word of explanation to Naomi. (Seriously, Joseph? If you forgot to get her flowers, there are better ways to handle it.)

Interestingly (according to Wikipedia), St. Valentine didn't start out being the patron saint of lovers. He was originally considered to be the first saint of spring. Slovenians believed that on his day, birds chose their mates and flowers began to grow. In 1382, Chaucer took the charming folk tradition about the birds and worked it into a poem honoring the first anniversary of the engagement of King Richard II of England to Anne of Bohemia. So we have him to blame for starting all this lace-edged nonsense.

Anyway, for this Black Friday, I decided to lighten my own mood by giving some books away. Three signed copies of Crosswind are up for grabs at Goodreads. Feel free to enter (US and Canada only, sorry) by clicking either this link or the one in the box on the left. The contest runs through the 22nd.

And in addition, especially for readers of my blog, the most pathetic Valentine's Day story posted here in the comments gets a Land, Sea, Sky mini-bookmark signed by Yours Truly. Go on -- spill it. It'll make me feel better.

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On top of all that, the trailer for Crosswind is featured today at Indies Unlimited. If you haven't had a chance to see it yet, stop by.

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These moments of bloggy love (ahem) have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.