Of Romance & Spookiness//October 133rd, 2022

 It’s that time of year again…The time when I feel the need to defend the fact that for some inexplicable reason, my second-favorite holiday has always been Valentine’s Day.

I don’t remember how or why my obsession with Valentine’s Day started, I just remember that every year, as February approached, the pink-and-red wave that suddenly washed over the world completely enchanted me. The excitement I felt when the Cupid silhouettes appeared in windows and the heart-shaped candy boxes took over store displays was unmatched by any other non-Halloween holiday, and I’ve often debated why. Perhaps it had to do with that long stretch of nothingness after Christmas time. Valentine’s Day, though much smaller in scale, was at least something to celebrate and get excited about. Maybe it was the fact that I was guaranteed attention from classmates on that day, via the punny little cards that we were required to hand out to everyone, meaning it was the one day of the year when I, by “law”, couldn’t be excluded. It could’ve even been the simple fact that I was an avid stuffed animal lover and lots of super cute plushies were often released during Valentine’s time. (I have a very distinct memory of falling in love with a stuffed poodle in a heart collar at a local store, to the point where I even told one of my teachers about it in the hope that she might buy it for me. I did eventually get it, though I can’t remember who wound up paying for it!) But whatever it was, it baffled me even in childhood. Though I didn’t have the language to describe it then, I identified as somewhat of an aromantic until I was much, much older, so a holiday devoted to love should have been the least interesting thing in the universe to me. Yet somehow, much like my scaredy-cat self came to love Halloween, the girl with no interest in romantic love came to love Valentine’s Day. Though I would be twenty years old before I actually had a “Valentine” in the traditional sense, I always found ways to celebrate, which usually involved made-up games with candy conversation hearts, such as a homemade version of “Mad Libs” where I would draw a random heart to fill in a blank space of a love letter or story, or simply just try to string the candy hearts together in such a way that it sounded like an actual sentence or conversation. These became my simple little traditions, but they always made me happy.

Into adulthood, my strange obsession with Valentine’s Day has remained…but as each year passes, I find out more and more that perhaps it isn’t so strange after all. 

Within about the last ten years or so, those “Let’s replace Valentine’s Day with a second Halloween” memes have become a big thing. I don’t know anything about their origins, but I assume they were started by someone who clearly loves Halloween but hates Valentine’s Day. They caught on quickly in the early days of the Halloween/spooky community, to the point where I got downright exhausted by well-meaning friends constantly sending them to me, due to, of course, having no interest in eliminating my second favorite holiday. But as the years went on, it seemed like these memes were having a positive effect: Halloween and Valentine’s Day began to fuse together a bit, eventually becoming what we in the Halloween community now refer to as Valloween. I became strangely thankful to the annoying but effective meme for bringing my second favorite holiday closer to the most important day of my year.

But the more I’ve learned as time has gone on, the more I’ve come to realize that the “Let’s replace Valentine’s Day with a second Halloween” meme actually isn’t the thread that connects the two holidays at all.

Halloween and Valentine’s Day have long been connected, and perhaps loving both holidays actually makes perfect sense.

For one thing, many vintage Valentines focused on spooky characters. Puns involving ghosts, witches, monsters, and skeletons were widely used on these cards, more than you would ever think if you weren’t aware of it.

In some cases, these Valentines were even spookier than actual Halloween cards of the same time period!

On a side note, there is also a whole world out there of vintage Valentines that don’t feature devils, ghosts, ghouls, witches, etc., that are also incredibly unintentionally creepy. Google “creepy vintage Valentines” and you’ll go down some fun rabbit holes, for sure. A lot of the sayings and sentiments probably wouldn’t fly in modern times. But, putting all that aside, you can see that vintage Valentines always had a bit of Halloween flair to them. I have no doubt in my mind that there were Halloween lovers back then who felt the exact same way that I do about Valentine’s Day, or possibly even more excited due to the fact that these types of cards existed.

In the mid-60s, Valentine’s stickers based on the Universal monsters also started to be produced, almost as if Valentine’s Day was being intentionally marketed to horror fans of spooky people of the time.

But, as much as Valentine’s Day seemed to lean into Halloween, on some level, Halloween also did its fair share of leaning into Valentine’s Day, or, at the very least, the two holidays shared a very common theme in the early part of the twentieth century.

I only really started thinking about it during the past year, as I started to add vintage Halloween cards to my collection, but many Halloween traditions of the time were actually centered around love and romance.

I was first made aware of this through the strange, fascinating old cards featuring anthropomorphic cabbages.

I always thought the appearance of cabbages in old Halloween imagery was a reference to mischievous traditions ie, cabbages being the toilet paper and eggs of yesteryear. However, upon really reading the sayings on these cards, and doing a little research, I found that cabbages were actually regarded as a way to find out about the characteristics of your future lover, if you looked at the leaves the right way on Halloween night. It’s cute and bizarre, but it’s not the only old Halloween tradition relating to finding your future love. 

Many old traditions and games played at Halloween parties seemed to connect to what was to come in your future romantic life.

Lighting a jack o’lantern in front of a mirror seems to be one of the most popular old Halloween traditions.

Even these old fortune telling games seem to mostly elude to things like meeting a handsome stranger, etc.  If you look closely enough, and choose to read into it, you can almost see a narrative here, of love-spell work beginning on October 31st, and manifesting into existence by February 14th.

It’s a strange combination of things, romance and spookiness, but it certainly seems like the two holidays really fed off of each other for a period of time. Perhaps now we’re simply coming full circle, fusing the two things together once again to create our Valloween. And maybe, just maybe, I was never so strange at all for the fact that Valentine’s Day is my second favorite holiday. Perhaps I was just a little ahead of the curve.

Stay spooky, my friends. And have a happy Valloween, no matter how it is you celebrate. Love comes in many forms. Embrace it.