love month: love my family traditions

As long as I can remember each year when the first Monday in February rolled around, my mom pulled out the same story complete with illustrations for our family-time night lesson.  The story tells of a family that gave each other homemade valentines throughout the month of February leading up to Valentine's Day. The Dad (telling the story) talks about how one of his daughters made sure everyone in the family got a valentine from her every single day.  He talks about how he starts to anxiously anticipate what she made him each evening on his drive home from work. With Valentine's Day only a day or two away, he talks about it with his wife one night who tells him that each night after making valentines for everyone else, this daughter checked her own bag and each night she found it empty.  No one had thought of her.  Of course the Dad in the story felt awful and ended up staying up all night making valentines for this daughter. I always felt determined to give a valentine to each member of my family each day. That simple story was such a good reminder to show our love for those closest to us not just expect it from them, which I find is so easy to do.

(Now that I'm a mom this story is a lot more emotional than I remembered....)

After the story we'd pull out construction paper, brown paper bags, markers, crayons, etc... and we'd make our own Valentine bags and hang them on the outside of each person's bedroom door.  Our family made and gave each other homemade valentines throughout the days leading up to Valentine's day, telling each other something we loved about each other or a strength we thought someone had.  This was Valentine's to me, I was actually pretty surprised when I got older and realized a lot of people had pretty bad feelings about the "day of love" if they didn't have a love interest. Valentine's, for me, was (and is) a day to celebrate everyone you love, not just a romantic interest. I'm so grateful too because at my schools people got chrysanthemums or heart-shaped suckers from classmates on Valentine's day and I was one of those kids that never got any.        
(man, there are some things about middle school and high school that are hard to miss, right?.)  

I took my love for the holiday the way I knew it with me when I moved from home and always got my roommates to participate in the brown bag valentines with me. I know that for me focusing on the good in people has never been a bad idea and I'm so grateful now that my mom had us do this each year.

This was the first year we made Valentine bags with kids.  And though sickness and craziness kept us from making as many valentines as we'd have liked, it was awesome for Lee to be so excited about the whole thing.  And it may or may not have melted my heart a little...