In the US it is customary for children to exchange penny Valentines, tiny minimal Valentine greetings in tiny envelopes, especially in school. My grade school classroom had a box to put all the Valentines in. My mother insisted on enclosing tiny valentine candies with each penny Valentine, causing quite a stir. Once it again it was quite obvious that my mother was the best mother ever. I even recall a year when she equipped us with red, silver and gold papers and paper doilies and we went at it with the glue and scissors, crafting an individual Valentine for each child in my class. (In retrospect this doily episode seems like it might have had more impact on my development than anyone may have suspected at the time.) Also, I always received Valentines from my parents and even from my pets and stuffed animals. My daughter was similarly gifted. However, Valentine treats were usually candy, or a paper greeting, not money. When I lived in France in 1983 I made a Valentine for the child of a French friend and the mother stared at it querulously and asked me if I "prepared them every year", leaving me to wonder if the French didn't have this Valentine custom. Perhaps it was simply a comment on the quality of the homemade Valentine. Now that my daughter is an adult, my husband buys the most inexpensive box of Godiva chocolates available at a kiosk in a department store in the mall, for each of us, to be presented on Valentine's Day. But he does not buy roses, which appear on every street corner on that day, at hugely inflated prices. From Wikipedia, I note that there is a move on by the diamond indu stry to make Valentine's Day a jewelry giving occasion, but that has not caught on at our house. Devon
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