Valentine’s Day has come and gone. My opinion of the holiday has had it’s ups and downs throughout the years, usually tied to the presence of someone to celebrate with. This year, I welcomed the simplicity of it—a day to celebrate love for others, traditionally by way of flowery note. I have a great appreciation for writing things down, as you might imagine.

I bought my youngest a box of Minecraft themed paper valentines a few weeks ago in anticipation of his class’s Valentine’s Day party announcement. I didn’t want all the good ones to be sold out and for him to be stuck giving out generic dinosaurs or assorted sporting equipment. It’s his last year in elementary school; the last time one of my children would fill out and fold little paper cards to deliver to each of their classmates. To my dismay, they did not have a party to celebrate the holiday this year. His teacher emailed the list of names and said the students would have a few minutes in the morning to pass out their valentines should they choose to bring them in. No candy or treats, please.

I can’t say I was surprised by the lack of fanfare for the holiday. In the time my children have been in elementary school, many of the holiday celebrations have been minimized or eliminated altogether. It makes me sad that he’s missed out on the valentine memories I had as a child. When I was in school we spent the days leading up to the holiday building personal mailboxes out of shoe boxes or milk jugs, and decorating them with pink and red hearts and those white paper doilies. On the day of, the entire afternoon was blocked off for a celebration of love where my classmates and I hand-delivered each of our carefully selected notes (sometimes handmade!) and spent time reading them over cupcakes and heart-shaped pretzels with juice. This year, my son stuffed a handful of valentines into a ziploc bag in his backpack and returned to his math lesson. I’m left wondering what the point is. Why do it at all?

A while back I ran into a neighbor while out on a walk and we got to talking about his postcard collection. He shared with me his albums full of postcards from the early 1900s designed specifically for Valentine’s day. He tried to impress me with the completeness of his collection (they were numbered and he was only missing a few), but I was fascinated by the fact that he had not read them. He held in his hands hundreds of love letters and he was only interested in collecting the art on the front of each card. If I had known him better I would have asked him to remove a few from their protective sleeves so I could behold the kind of love note that was important enough for someone to preserve for over one hundred years. His disinterest in the messages reminded me that there are all kinds of people in the world. He did share one who’s sender, a young woman, had written the message in code presumably so her father could not snoop the content of the letter to her valentine. This interested me greatly, but to my disappointment, my neighbor didn’t share with me the decoded message despite my curiosity. He said instead that he was having it written up and framed as a gift for his wife. Even though I didn’t get to read the words, it made me happy to know that so many people were sending postcards of love to one another all those years ago.

What happened to us? How did we go from a society that believed that love was so important to communicate that we’d write it in coded messages, to one that allows only a few minutes for young children to exchange pre-printed cards they hastily fill out with just their name and the name of the recipient? Is love less important than it used to be?

I’ve had a rough go with love, but I know that I need it. We all do. As we move further into our obsession with productivity and output, I think it’s more important than ever to let the people around us know we love them just for being there. I grew up in a household where love was scarce and that led me to believe was that I was unworthy of it. That’s probably why the valentines I received in school meant so much to me. There is value in teaching our littlest children that taking some time out of their arduous academic day to celebrate love and friendship is a worthwhile endeavor. Learning to care well for the community around us is just as important as long division, and the day we designate to celebrate our connections to each other shouldn’t be treated as an afterthought. We ought to look for more opportunities to share notes of love with each other, not less.

Out of all the messages I send to the people in my life, the one I want them to hear the loudest is that I love them. I don’t always make it a priority to share my love, sometimes it feels so obvious it doesn’t need to be said, but the only way to be sure someone knows how you feel is to tell them. So in celebration of Valentine’s day, a day set aside for the outward expression of love and admiration for all the special people in our lives, I want to say it plain—I love you, dear reader. Thank you for reading.