Two Weeks to Valentines
Love it or hate it, Valentine’s Day is coming. Soon radios will be playing the best of the year’s “love songs.” I truly hope Ke$ha’s “Your love is my drug” does not make the list of romantic mood-setters. All the stores already have their myriads of chocolates, and their bevies of flowers—not to mention the aisles upon aisles of teddy bears, t-shirts, mugs, and cards that profess emotional enrapture. Isn’t the commercialization simply exhilarating?
Before you go commenting that Valentine’s Day is overly commercialized and entirely created by marketers to have another excuse to sell diamonds, etcetera etcetera, etcetera, please stop and think about all of our holidays. Do any remain untainted by the marketing urge to run out and run up credit debt? No. Now, please no picking on this day of love.
I was going to write a summary of Valentine’s Day, the history, traditions, and so on, but I have since discovered that to do so would take much longer than one blog post. Besides, Wikepedia has a fairly credible summary. Instead I want to share a few of the odder Valentine’s Facts I’ve collected. Here we go!
1) The oldest surviving love poem is from the time of the Sumerians. The small clay tablet was uncreatively named “Istanbul #2461.”
2) The heart, which is highly prevalent in Valentine’s iconography, was especially revered by the Ancient Egyptians as the seat of the soul. They would take great pains to embalm and preserve the heart, but would throw out the brain.
3) Cupid became associated with Valentine’s Day because he was the son of the Roman love goddess Venus (Aphrodite in Greek). His arrows were said to force people to fall in love even in Ancient times. The story of the “Aeneid” has perhaps the first recorded instance of this…poor Dido.
4) Valentine’s Day got its name from the Saint Valentine who was a priest in 270 A.D. Roman Emperor Claudius II beheaded him for performing marriages. Claudius had been having issues with his soldiers refusing to go to war; instead they wanted to stay at home with their wives. So he outlawed marriage ceremonies.
5) During the Medieval Ages, the people thought that birds selected their mates on February 14th. For an inexplicable reason, the boys and girls decided they should too.
6) The saying of “wearing your heart on your sleeve” came from the Medieval Ages as well. People would draw draws of the opposite gender from a bucket to select who their valentine would be. Then they would wear the name on their sleeve for the week.
7) It was in the late 1800’s that v-day cards rose to popularity. Despite the prudish Victorian era, they were very racy cards. So much so that the Chicago Post Office refused to send 25,000 of them! Apparently they were “not fit to be carried through the United States Mail.”
Next week, I’ll give you the other half of my 14 fun facts. ;)
Recycled CD Lamp Shade
Materials:
2 Sun-catcher sheets from last week
1 Lamp stand (just another excuse to go to the thrift store!)
1 Glass Form (the top of the lamp)
Tin Foil
Baking sheet
Oven
Directions
1) 1.) Heat the oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Line your baking sheet with tin foil. Cover your glass form with tin foil.
2) 2.) Place your baking sheet and covered form into the oven. Center one Sun-catcher sheet over the form. Allow everything to bake in the oven until the form has melted to conform to the shape of the mold, about 4 minutes.
3) 3.) Remove and allow the mold and new plastic shape to cool. Put everything back in the oven, plastic side down. Center your other plastic sheet on the form and bake. Remove and cool.
4) 4.) Now the two forms should have melted together to form a solid lamp shade. Slide the center glass form out of the center.
5) 5.)You can trim off any stray plastic pieces to make the lamp look more regular, if you like. Similarly, if the two sun-catcher pieces did not melt together completely, a little hot glue at the seams works wonders.
6) 6.) Place the lamp shade on your lamp stand. Enjoy!
**** Safety note: please always be around your new lamp shade when the light is on. My light bulb never burned hotly enough to remelt my plastic, but every lamp is different. And the last thing we would want is an accidental fire, right?
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