Bouncy Valentine

It does not really matter if you are into it or not. Valentine’s Day is one of those useless occasions we all like to bash while stuffing our mouths with heart-shaped chocolates. Back when I was a teenager for instance, it was terribly uncool to admit even the slightest interest for this celebration. The official reason was inflexible despise for its grim commercial connotations. The real reason however was that single teenagers were much more vocal about it than the rest of their kin. I grew up in the area where that certain fellow named Valentine—one of the many, as Romans liked a lot to torture Christians named Valentine at the time—met his martyrdom. This meant you could always hide your corny side and devote yourself to celebrating Valentine’s Day with the canonical excuse, if you wished to— and for the record, nobody among my acquaintances or under retirement age did.

Things have not changed a great deal from those days. Iceland, however huge its fascination may be all year round for celebrating this and that and for massive chocolate consumption, is still kind of immune to festivities that are too much rooted into religious cults that are not strictly its own. The only places where I have seen Valentine’s Day’s items around are a couple of sad shops in Laugavegur and Hagkaup. Hagkaup does not count though, as they also promote nonsense like “American Days” or “Italian Days” at random during the year, just to sell stuff nobody wants in normal circumstances. Maybe other retailers in town have their assortment of doves and hearts, winged dwarfs and teddy bears somewhere as well, but they did not try hard to put them on display so we will never know. For different reasons, there is a chance that both Valentine the martyr and Valentine the chocolatier would not mind meeting halfway in Iceland, even if Cupids are not all that popular here—yet.