Valentine’s Day

Is anyone else getting a little tired of all the high pressure tactics surrounding Valentines Day gifts? Emails from the Vermont Teddy Bear people, Godiva chocolates, pajamagrams, jewelry stores, and too many internet florists to count are clogging my inbox. I have to wade through all of this nonsense just to see if anyone’s giving anything good away on freecycle. (If you don’t freecycle you should. I’m just sayin’)

While my natural instincts say that any holiday which promotes the consumption of chocolate has to be a good thing, my cheapness kicks in along with my common sense and I roll my eyes at the whole thing.

I don’t need to spend $90 on a stuffed bear for my husband for him to know that I love him, and if he bought me one I don’t know what I would do with it. Not to mention my disgust at $90 on a bear. What are they made of that they are worth that kind of money? For $90 it better make my bed and vacuum my floors. Which brings me to a good gift anytime of the year…maid service. Gentlemen, if you want to get lucky, chocolate and flowers are good for one night, but a sparkling bathroom and a mopped kitchen will give an afterglow that lasts a week or so. Even if the clean only lasts a day, the memory of the clean will sparkle in her mind. Trust me on this, if you want to give her a gift she will brag about for years to come, then a maid service is the way to go. (Look at all the women nodding their heads if you don’t believe me.)

I know that to the male mind this may seem to be a completely unromantic gift. I hate to argue with you about this, but I will anyway. A maid for your lady says, “I love you too much to make you wipe the pee off of the toilet or the bathroom floor for one more day.” Now that’s love. In fact, that’s swooning, romantic, love me until I cry gifting right there. The best thing about it is, if you can’t afford a maid then you can be the maid. I don’t think it has quite the same pizazz if you force the children to do it. I can promise you that the sight of you in rubber gloves with a bottle of bleach and scrubbing the bathroom floor will be the sexiest thing your wife has seen in years. You may have to catch her as she swoons, and that’s dead sexy, too.