I don't hate Valentine's Day.

It kind of bugs me that the socially acceptable thing to do is to hate Valentine's Day, proclaim it a Hallmark holiday, total BS, and not worth anyone's time. I get it. If you're single, it probably sucks (although when I was single, it was a great day to go drinking at seedy dive bars with friends), and if your husband is deployed, it definitely sucks, but I don't hate it. Here's why.

You see, this is me and Thak's 8th Valentine's Day. Of those, he's only missed one. It's the only holiday the Army always left us, except once, toward the end of his 3rd tour in Iraq, but even then it didn't suck too bad because he was coming home on R&R just a few weeks later, so we were mostly just focusing on that.

The Army has taken the vast majority of holidays from us through deployments, the field, TDY's, and even him getting called in at odd hours to bail some stupid lower-enlisted idiot out of jail on Christmas or Easter because they got drunk and drove around town like that. Sometimes it was almost as if it were blatantly planned so that we'd lose out on something we'd rather have had, like when he had to go to the field for two days, and one of those days was my birthday, or when his 3rd tour went just long enough that he missed two of his birthdays and two anniversaries during a single deployment. Of course, none of this is really blatant planning on Uncle Sam's part. It's just bad luck. But it happens a lot.

So no, I don't hate Valentine's Day. That's because it's the one holiday Uncle Sam has almost always left us when he's taken everything else more times than not. We like it because we have it.

And I like my very big box of Godiva chocolates that Thak got me this year. Yes I do!! (And he loves his super sweet vintage Vikings shirt that I got him!)