Abilene App News: Memories Past - Prairie Valentine’s Day Part 2 of 3

How to Enjoy a Prairie Valentine’s Day

Part 2 - Memories Past

By Karilea Rilling Jungel

When it comes to how we remember Valentine’s Day, we tend to recall the best of memories recollecting the biggest of small acts. A small gift, some shared acts, maybe one or two important words. When it becomes personal.

Chiclet with Heart - photo by Karilea Rilling Jungel

My first Valentine’s Day with my husband was between that first date and discussions that divorced people have with one another when finding that just maybe they might be a good match for one another, knowing that matches burn…and getting married a short six months afterwards. Because I had two children, Valentine’s Day was all about sharing the joy of romanticism of love with them – teaching them how to enjoy the day on a shoe-string budget. Paste and construction paper, cutouts of hearts on home-made cards – that was Valentine’s Day. The way my California by way of my Midwest folks taught me. It was sharing cards with classmates. It was simple, never overdone.

So it was that year, 1980, when my husband proposed with a Chiclet. You remember Chiclets, that little piece of square gum, the kind that sticks to your shoes? Well, that was the proposal; a Chiclet with a heart on it, a promise for more. It was an inexpensive little trinket, and over the years it has lost its chain, but it remains with me still.

Memories mostly abound from our school days. When another friend was asked what she recalled, she had a conversation with herself and her memories from childhood reveal this story:

SELF: Did you celebrate Valentine's Day when you were small?

CHILD: Oh yes, especially at school. Valentine's Day was a big, red and pink slash on the class room calendar. On Valentine's Day we'd carefully stuff our school bags with a brown paper sack filled with Valentines enough for our teacher and every student in the class. We spent the night before addressing each one and then carefully signing them in cursive.

SELF: You mean everyone in the class made a Valentine for each and every class member?

CHILD: Why yes, of course. No one was left out. Even the boys made Valentines for everyone.

SELF: There was time to do this?

CHILD: It was wintertime and hard to play a long time outside. You might get frostbite or at least your cheeks turned red and your nose dripped. There was time to make cards by the dozens in front of the warm fire in between the snowstorms.

SELF: You mean handmade?

CHILD: Well, some did come from Woolworth's-mostly the boys just punched out the preprinted ones from stiffened paper, but the girls created cardboard and construction paper greetings. Each one contained homemade fantasies of friendship and love.

SELF: Did you deliver them in your neighborhood?

CHILD: Some we did; we'd ring the door bell and run away leaving hurried footprints in the snow. But our classmates, that was a different story. Love was not quite so shy there. In the morning, after the Pledge of Allegiance, we'd deposit them in the classroom mailbox. The mailbox was an old cardboard carton rescued from the grocery store for just this purpose. Kind mothers festooned the box with crepe paper ribbons and construction paper hearts, plus hearts made of lace. White doily hearts on red construction paper smelling of paste. In the center was an accordion tissue heart that could fold flat in two and then pop open again in all its glory like a magical winter blooming rose.

SELF: What happened next?

CHILD: First we had to do our lessons. Near the end of the school day we all took turns being mailmen. We each delivered fistfuls of Valentines in turn. Lumpy Valentines promised lollipops. Small bumpy Valentines carried candy hearts with secret messages like "Be Mine". On other cards the odor of cloves promised tiny, hot red hearts that turned your tongue red and stained fingertips crimson.

SELF: When did it end? When the school bus came or the car pool was called?

CHILD: No. It all ended when the bell rang. Row by row we went to the cloak room and carefully packed our satchels with our carefully counted cards. Next we'd run, laugh, and slide with our friends. Out in the snow we'd go... all the way home.

Diane Bunker Gallagher – South Carolina

Another personal message from a friend of my husband’s shows that at an early age, he was smitten by Cupid’s arrow:

“When I was in the third grade in an elementary school in Wisconsin we celebrated Valentine's Day in a nice way. Our parents would take us to the local drug store where we could buy a box of little Valentine cards. Here were 35 kids in my class, 14 girls so I had to fill out 14 cards and pass them out on Valentine's Day. Every girl got 20 cards and every boy got 14 cards. Of course, if everyone in the class did the same thing I would return home that afternoon with the same number of cards I started with. There was one girl in my class I liked, Vicki Henderson, but, at that age, one would never dare to express one's feelings. I wouldn't have known how anyway. Just thinking about telling her made me so scared I couldn't talk.

When I got home from school I went through all the cards in hopes of finding a special word or two on Vicki's card. To my amazement, when I read her card it said, "Hi Fred. Hope you have a nice Valentine's Day." Now I don't doubt that this was her generic way of saying "Happy Valentine's Day" to every boy in the class but I imagined that maybe, just maybe, she didn't remember every boy's name and that this card might have included a small extra thought for me.” As Fred explained, “This wasn't a story of cupid sliding down a ray of sunshine to make two beautiful people fall in love. But for an eight year old kid who was the youngest and shortest in his class, who got his first pair of thick glasses at the age of seven and who stuttered so badly he had to see a speech therapist, the fact that Vicki Henderson even knew my name made it a pretty special day.”

Fred Walker – Florida.