2. Valentine's Day
Yes, Valentines Day! The most pointless, miserable and downright vindictive holiday that haunts the year. First, let me get the obvious point out of the way Valentines Day, above all else, is the festival of rampant commercialism. On no other day are you expected to buy so many random things that are relevant within a single twenty-four hour slot. Giant heart shaped bears that are impossible to hug without severe arm strain? Never used. Red roses? Will die a horrible death in under a week. A little dangly heart shaped ornament? Broken and in the back of the wardrobe by March! And yet if you choose to avoid the urge you are vilified for it, you are shamed into fitting into a mould that nobody really cares about and so must wallow in your barely averted guilt while clutching a tacky pink thing that makes your heart ashamed just to look at it. Oh, and that isnt even the start of my hate for the evil institution known as Valentines Day. Valentines Day is painful whether youre single or happily coupled up. I know, because Ive been on both sides of the divide and have had a thoroughly awful time of it every year. If youre single youre naturally expected to be miserable. No matter how content you are in everyday life without a partner for one day of the year youre made to feel like the lowest of the low. Everybody else seems to have found their soulmate and be settling into an eternity of blissfulness. While you, the proclaimed loser, are left standing to the sideline practically being pointed at by vicious advertisers going Why dont you have anybody to have sex with? Is it because your heart has shrivelled to nothing? Is it because youve accepted that nobody ever could love you? Why, mortal, why? Not that Valentines Day is any better when youre actually part of a pair. Those couples looking all happy? They are dirty rotten liars. Everybody is miserable on Valentines Day. It tends to be the ending of relationships rather than the cementing, perhaps due to its unfortunate habit of inspiring declarations of love that can only be met with panic and a quick dart to the exit. And, even if you manage to avoid the L-bomb, somehow Valentines Day seems to inspire problems beyond that. Every couple that Ive ever met has told harrowing tales of awful fights on that most terrible of days. Every couple has ended up in a screaming fit over too little romance or too much romance or flowers being their evil selves and vomiting pollen everywhere. Its inevitable, really. As is misery on Valentines Day. Its best to batten down the hatches on the 14th of February, and accept that a perfectly good day is going to be ruined no matter what. However, its not quite as bad as