Valentine's Day

Thursday was Valentine's day. Before I write more about that though, I must confess that I my grammar freakery has gotten a bit out of control -- I just the last few minutes doing research on whether this post ought to be titled "Valentines Day", or "Valentine's Day". Counting the number of google hits for each search term indicates that "Valentine's" is more popular, but only just: it has 24,800,000 hits to "Valentines" 22,500,000.

As usual though, a trip to Wikipedia set me right. First of all, their article on Valentine's day includes the apostrophe. More important even than Wikipedia though, our very well educated friend Cammy blogged about "Valentine's" day, and evidently on the day of, too. Come on Cammy, there have got to be better things to do on Valentine's day than update your blog! ;-)

The final straw though, is that there are of course several Saints Valentine, and a feast in their honor was traditionally held on February 14th. Somewhere along the line though, we seem to have dropped the feast in favor of chocolates, cards, and roses.

What I intended to blog about this morning though, is Valentine's day in Japan. Here, the Valentine's day tradition is for ladies to give the men in their lives chocolates.
When I explained this to Sarah though, and suggested we celebrate the Japanese way -- well, let's just say she was less than enthusiastic. ;-)

There is a follow-up holiday in Japan on the 14th of March called "White Day". On this day, guys are supposed to reciprocate & buy chocolates (generally more expensive chocolates) for their ladies. As you might expect, while celebrating White Day was a good idea too, it was not going to get me out of Valentine's day, and that's just fine. I am not one to pass up an opportunity to show Sarah how much she means to me.

Playing into her hand as well, earlier this week at work we had our annual compensation conversation, so come Thursday I was feeling rather flush. One bottle of '99 Dom Perignon, an 8 dollar cup of strawberries, a few Godiva chocolates, and take-out donburi (sashimi on rice) later, we had ourselves a wonderful, quiet evening at home. With Robert.