Many students may remember the sound of laughter ringing throughout their elementary hallways, as small hands drop small valentines into carefully crafted boxes. Pink and red streamers hang throughout the classroom, and hearts decorate the cabinets and walls.
But the Valentine’s Day of yester-year is now a bit of nostalgia that LSE high school students look back on fondly. For current LSE Knights, Valentine’s Day is a mixed bag. Some love to celebrate with their significant other, while others opt to surround themselves with friends on this day of love.
For freshman Mollie Moses (9), this year she celebrated Valentine’s Day with her boyfriend, whom she met through a prank text. “We started dating because I prank-texted him. I pretended to be his mother yelling at him,” Moses said.
Eventually, after getting to be better friends, they both ended up confessing their feelings for each other and started dating in early August. Moses believes that dating someone has impacted her experience with Valentine’s Day positively as she enjoys the romantic aspect of celebrating with a partner.
“It’s nice having a legit Valentine who isn’t just a friend or your mom,” Moses said.
For Valentine’s Day this year, Moses and her boyfriend made cookie dough as a date. Moses also said she bought him some dark chocolate as well.
In a survey of 187 LSE students, which asked a range of questions pertaining to Valentine’s Day, there were a wide array of responses to the question: “How does dating, or not dating someone, impact your experience with this holiday?” Answers varied from “It sucks if you’re not dating someone” to “I enjoy Valentine’s Day just the same when I’m single”.
For many LSE students, being single on Valentine’s Day is not a negative. In fact, for freshman Lucy Deitering, Valentine’s Day is a nice holiday to break the dreariness of the winter season. She also enjoys the treats that come with the day.
“It’s just something fun to break up the winter with,” Deitering said. “[I like] being able to eat some chocolate! That’s the best excuse to eat sweets!”
But the cost of these sweets and treats can be a deterrent for many students. For the most part, people said they either didn’t have an opinion on the commercialization, or they believe it’s another holiday for large corporations to gain more money than they already do.
A notable example of negative opinions on Valentine’s Day commercialization would be this comment, made by Emily Miller (11): “It’s completely capitalistic, and the corporations are manipulating consumers [to think] that they need to buy things and spend money to love someone”. On the flip side, some people think that while Valentine’s Day is very much commercialized it isn’t necessarily a negative thing. This can be seen in a quote from an LSE Junior: “I understand that Valentine’s Day is capitalistic but I don’t let that get in the way of me having fun.”
The following question on the poll asked how much on average students typically spend on Valentine’s Day, and many responses came in!
As exhibited in this chart, the considerable majority of students said they spend around $10-$25 (30.1% of poll results) on average for Valentine’s Day, while the rest said they spend nothing (27.7% of poll results), $25 or over (22.9% of results), and finally $10 or under at 19.3% of poll results.
The online poll also found that 44.2% of students have Valentine’s Day plans, 45.5%, do not have
any plans and 10.3% are unsure whether they have plans or not. In fact, more people said they had Valentine’s Day plans than those who said they were in a relationship.
In the end, Valentine’s Day is about showing love towards loved ones, romantic or otherwise!
