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St Valentine’s – Coming Soon to a Shopping Centre Near You
By Annetta Holmes

How many men snub St Valentine’s Day as an adjunct to Christmas but just as costly? After all, is it worth losing all the gain you’ve built up since being penniless after the Season of good cheer and jingling tills…eh…bells? Just as you’re about to upgrade from four consecutives weeks of post-Christmas beans-on-toast, the next most expensive commercial success after December the twenty-fifth starts nudging a gleam into your lady-love’s eyes.

Not three weeks into January, chocolates appear in new dress on the shop shelves. These previously standard after-dinner treats now metamorphose into outrageously expensive morsels. Delights enclosed in red boxes, their outer layer wreathed in roses, and cherubs dancing, bows and silver hearts floating from their chubby digits. Exact replicas were masquerading pre-Christmas as gifts from Father Christmas himself - red packaging full of jolly ‘Ho Ho’s’ and snowflakes.

Clever marketers, quick to squeeze an extra quid or nine off their packaging bottom line spotted the connection. Red. Glorious red! Both events. Red! Didn’t even have to change the big ink cartridge down at the printers. Kept the same base colour just converted ‘Ho Ho’s’ to pinkish little people with dimpled knees and curly blonde locks.

However only a cynical wag would point out that Santa’s red and St V’s tint are linked. The direct result of smart lads in lime-green suits brain-storming an answer to the container glut left over from the most expensive commercial success in the business calendar. The same boys that made you buy, buy, buy using a myth surrounding a jolly plump man swooping around behind hairy antelope with impressive horn arrangements, and have now turned their incredible talent to shore up revenues after January sales plummet below-the-hole-in-the-bottom-of-the-basement level.

Three weeks before the 14th of February the marketing machine is spouting at full-throttle. Layer upon layer of cherry-red engulfs the globe – except in those places that don’t have T.V., radio, telephones or marketing jocks, like Bovet Island just north of the Antarctic Circle. In less remote places shop windows, magazines and flower stalls are awash with carmine. It flows seamlessly, embedding itself within the smallest of nooks and crannies, followed closely by the nervous twitter rustling through men. They hurry to and fro, heads down, ignoring the price tags attached to all things dipped in a ripe pomegranate hue. Punchy pay-off lines zing through the airwaves, mesmerising those who wouldn’t be caught flowerless, chocolate-free or without a gift when the sun sets on Cupid’s Day.

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Written by: Annetta Holmes
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