Valentine’s Day the Kern UMC Way (Originally posted February 15, 2007)

TRANSFERRED FROM LIVEJOURNAL Well, yesterday was Valentine’s Day, folks...as if you didn’t know that. Hubby and I don’t usually do anything for each other so it was no surprise when I didn’t receive flowers or candy or anything like that. It’s just that we’d rather spend that money on something else (like Christmas, or birthdays...) than on such a highly commercialized holiday. We did, however, go to the Wednesday night supper at our church, which was wonderful! It was a Valentine’s Day theme, and the church’s youth groups did the entire thing; from setting and decorating the tables, to taking drink and food orders (normally we all just line up and get the food ourselves), to clearing plates and bringing desserts. There were balloons tied to covered blocks of wood on each table, tea candles in paper luminary bags, and a raffle drawing for chocolates and the like. There were tip jars placed on each table, with the instruction that should we desire, we could leave an appropriate tip for the youth groups. The money from the tip jars would go to the youth missions throughout the year. All the youth did a FANTASTIC job, even though you could tell a few of them were extremely nervous. Oh, and dinner was wonderful; it consisted of roast pork loin with a cranberry glaze, mixed vegetables, and twice-baked potatoes. There was also a salad bar (we have one ever week and everybody says it's the best salad bar in town) and fruit. Dessert was cupcakes for the young (and young at heart) and baked apples with cinnamon and vanilla ice cream. Everything was yummy! To top off a lovely dinner, Hubby and Kiddo made me a gift. It was made of red construction paper, pink construction paper hearts, lots of scotch tape and staples, and outlines of both Hubby’s and Kiddo’s hands. The words “I love you Mommy!” and “Happy Valentine’s Day” were written all over it. Then, to top it all off, stapled inside this sweet homemade wrapping paper, was a new Josh Groban CD!!! Talk about a wonderful Valentine’s Day present! I think I’ll need to keep the construction paper wrap that they both worked so hard on; it’s a treasure that should be kept. Hope you all had a wonderful Valentine’s Day, too! TTFN JMS