Valentine’s Day

Someone thinks that there is no need to have such a festival as ‘Valentine’s Day’ to show our sincerity to whom you love genuinely. What is your opinion? Write an article expressing your views on this issue.

Valentine’s Day has been around for more than five centuries. The 14th of February was set aside as a day for lovers to spend time with each other and to let each other know how much each of them means to the other. Unfortunately, that meaning has been either muddled or lost completely due to the sloppy promotion of businessmen. Some people therefore claim that this festival gives no real significance so it is no longer justified to exist. I totally subscribe to such views.

By and large, a festival should be able to release people’s tension from daily life, usually through friends or family members joining together to share. Valentine’s Day seems to bring the opposite though. The ambiance around the festival often gives people fantasy about how romantic the day becomes. Then, when a lover’s performance falls short of the other’s expectation, it is more likely to end up a clash. Such worries, compounded by the commercial push, make lovers too nervous to prepare for the holiday. Many studies have shown that lovers run a far higher risk of breaking up during this festival than any other ordinary day. This ironic outcome is caused by too high a standard lovers form for the Day.

The festival seems to inform that love can be simply measured by gifts. To me, it is one thing if you could be pampering your lover with sincerity and it’s another to be showering your lover with chocolates and flowers. The latter has nothing to do with how much you mean to your lover. Real love is more a permanent blessing than a single day’s giving. I believe that Valentine’s Day is a day to thank your lover for being in your life and to thank that you were blessed enough to find true love out of the billions of people in the world. Awfully, modern love has been polluted by materialism, which especially holds valid for Valentine’s Day. We should underplay the festival because it rarely conveys the correct message: love appeals to our soul.

Every festival has certain food or product to commemorate. For example, we have moon cakes for the Mid-autumn Festival, rice dumplings for the Dragon Boat Festival, and kumquat for the Lunar New Year. It is only Valentine’s Day that does not involve any standard things for celebration. Or, you can say that ‘gifts’ themselves are the tradition. Then, the practice is no more than boosting materialism. Lovers will be misguided by the misconception that their sincerity is directly proportional to the value of gifts. The world seems to mask the most terrible consumerism with Valentine’s Day.

Valentine’s Day ought to only be celebrated if celebrated properly. If you have someone special in your life that you want to show your appreciation for, then you most definitely should spend Valentine’s with them, letting them know that you love them. However, modern people have rendered Valentine’s Day into a form of extravagance, simply a means abused by businessmen to profiteer. If we continuously taint Valentine’s Day that was once meaningful to lovers, our society had better dismiss it as a very ordinary day.