Weeks before Valentine’s Day arrives, shops stock their shelves with roses and boxes of chocolate. Customers flood in, hastily grabbing the items and ignoring the hefty price tags in attempt to please their loved ones.  

Valentine’s Day has evolved into a useless, consumerist holiday in which significant others feel obliged to buy each other extravagant, expensive gifts in order to prove their love.   

Previously, Valentine’s Day was called the Feast of Lupercal in which the Romans celebrated fertility. However, Pope Gelasius  renamed it St. Valentine’s Day in 496 AD.

In the Middle Ages, the day became associated with love because people believed Feb. 14 was the day that birds started mating.  However, the day has evolved into mostly a day for businesses to increase their profits. From a young age, we are taught that Valentine’s Day is about gifts. Stemming from the elementary school tradition of gifting classmates with sweets, even children are taught that Valentine’s Day is materialistic.  

According to ABC News, each Valentine’s season, $4.3 billion is spent on jewelry, $2 billion on flowers and $1.7 billion on chocolate, meaning that the average person spends about $140 on Valentine’s Day presents.     

Even worse, if you don’t buy your partner a gift, you may be viewed by others or even your partner as cheap or lazy. Why do we need a special day of the year to show a significant other how much we love them? Shouldn’t that be done regularly in a healthy relationship?

Instead of spending on this money on expensive gifts like jewelry, couples could cook dinner for each or watch a movie at home. Instead of buying an expensive, generic card, you could make a more personal homemade one.  By reclaiming the day from the corporations, couples can redefine a holiday into something actually worth celebrating.