I find Valentine’s Day to be a pretty high pressure holiday. At least with Christmas, if I want to keep things minimal I can claim that I’m, “focusing more on really living the liturgy this year.” Not so with Valentine’s Day. ”Living the liturgy” today means celebrating Sts. Cyril and Methodius. And, really, it’s too bad they get short shrift every year because they are pretty neat saints who even have their very own encyclical. In the spirit of respecting the culture we’re trying to evangelize, we are not anti-Valentine’s Day. I know, I know. It’s a Hallmark holiday. But just because hardly anyone understands what true love looks like, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to celebrate it. But we don’t, on the other hand, have big expectations for each other. My husband and I aren’t big gift-givers in general and we don’t have a gift giving tradition for this day.
But the low expectations make it all the harder. If I don’t want to be an absolute curmudgeon it seems I ought to make some effort. Produce some token of affection. And today just sort of failed to launch. After a morning of . . . well, I have no idea what happened this morning, but sometime late in the morning I sent the younger children away for rest time and managed to put together a special dessert*. I had a vague idea of doing a nice dinner as well but when my husband called to check in at 3:00 I was totally fried and really tired and suggested that, perhaps if we added wine and candles, my special dessert could be considered a complete meal? He responded by coming home early, sending me out shopping for garden supplies, and making dinner. After which we all had dessert together. Win, win, I think.
*The dessert was this Deep, Dark Chocolate Tart which is gluten, dairy, and egg free. I couldn’t find my arrowroot powder so I substituted finely shredded coconut in the crust. The two things are not at all similar but the crust was delicious. For the filling all I did was melt together 8 oz of dark chocolate and a can of coconut milk, whisk until smooth and pour. It set up just fine and was less fussy. I served it with fresh raspberries.
