Valentine’s Day memories

[media-credit id=3 align=”alignleft” width=”225″][/media-credit]To get a break from packing away Christmas décor, my husband recently took me to the movies.

We saw Les Miserables. It was very powerful and a tearjerker beyond belief. I thought it was a very beautifully-done movie – very poignant and thought-provoking.

The acting was superb, music excellent and photography outstanding.

If some of those actors don’t get Academy Awards, I’ll be shocked.

Still sniffling, we stopped at a sister’s home on the way home. My brother-in-law thought we had just come from a wake.

“No,” I explained. “We just saw Les Miserables.”

No sooner did the words come out of my mouth than a fresh onslaught of tears began. The movie’s impact was that powerful.

At that point, my niece starting laughing, and I had no idea why.

It seems that a young man had made a recording of his parents crying in their car after seeing the movie. He posted it on YouTube. She played it for me on her cell phone, and it was pretty funny.

But I’m glad we hadn’t ended up on YouTube for all the world to see. If that had been my kid, I’d have clobbered him.

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For some reason, this year it’s taking longer to dismantle Christmas decorations, pack them into cartons and haul them up to the attic.

There’s no hurry, but I do like to have the house back in some semblance of order.

As soon as the Christmas décor comes down, it’s replaced with Valentine’s Day decorations. Already a small legion of white angels sits on a table in the front hallway, ready to welcome guests.

I want to add red ribbons around all their heavenly little necks. The Valentine angels make a nice display. Heart-themed decorations are also enjoyable this time of year.

Thinking back to all the other Valentine’s Day holidays throughout the decades, the ones that are clearest in memory date back to elementary school days.

In probably the second or third grade, the teacher had everyone in the class help decorate a large cardboard box. We covered it in red and white paper and then added dozens of hearts, flowers and so forth.

Oh, wow, just thinking back on that box makes me smile because it looked so festive and beautiful. Plus, a lot of love went into making it. There was a large opening in its top.

For several days before Valentine’s Day, every student in the class brought in stacks of Valentines in small white envelopes. We wrote the names of classmates in neat letters.

When the big day finally came, the teacher pulled the cards out of the decorative box one by one and placed them on our desks.

They were the old-fashioned wooden desks with lift up tops that even had holes for ink bottles. Can you even imagine how old that makes me feel? Ha!

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Of course, it was always wildly exciting to think of receiving cards from certain heartthrobs. Whenever that happened, it made me pretty happy.

Every kid went home with piles of Valentines. I’d read the messages and signatures for days afterward.

There were always heart-shaped Valentine cookies at school on Valentine’s Day, too, that were part of the special celebration for the day of love.

Handmade hearts of every size and shape decorated the classroom. We drew them onto red construction paper and shared dull scissors to cut them out.

Oh yeah, Valentine’s Day was a big deal then. Because I’m not in elementary school classrooms these days, I wonder if it’s even still celebrated.

I went to Bartlett Elementary School on Onota Street, and the images of every classroom and the hallways are still very clear in my mind.

The wooden floors always gleamed. The classroom windows were huge, looking out onto either Onota Street or the school playground from the back of the building.

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Bartlett School has now been converted into condominiums. It makes me chuckle every time I drive by there. Someday I’d like to see what it looks like inside.

Would I still be able to recognize where the big dollhouse and sandbox stood in Mrs. Fuller’s kindergarten class? Probably not if the kindergarten classroom is now somebody’s living room.

Long gone, too, are the loud bells that signaled the beginning and end of the school day.

Isn’t it funny how things change yet others remain the same?

There won’t be any big box decorated for Valentine’s Day around here, but I’ll still wait to see if any Valentines come in the mail.

Posted by Susan M. Wicker Guerrero on February 14, 2013. Filed under Columns,From the Heart,Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry