Every year around this time, the blog starts to get a few more hits than usual from Google, usually searches for stuff like “Vallentyne’s Day”. Folks are obviously not looking for this blog, but rather are looking for tips on romance, special Valentine’s Day gifts, great ideas for dates and ways to woo your special someone. Oh man, have they come to the wrong place. I mean really. Just ask Nikki how romantic I am. It’s a tragic irony (for her) that my name is Vallentyne, but my romantic instincts are that of a gorilla, or perhaps, an aardvark. So in an effort to help those folks out a bit, here are some things I know about Valentine’s Day.

Valentine’s Gift Ideas you should never consider:

– Power tools and/or small appliances have nothing to do with Valentine’s Day, no exceptions that can be listed here on a family blog
– Tickets to Sporting events – as a general rule, maybe an exception for the Fabio Look-alike Shirtless Wrestling Association
– A lovingly crafted selection of RSS feeds for her own Google Reader account is not the “mixed tape” of this decade. If you don’t know what an RSS feed is, you should consider yourself lucky to not be married to me. If your name is also Nikki, then I guess I’m sorry, but you knew I was a geek when you married me.

Valentine’s Gift Ideas you should consider:

– Chocolates, wine, flowers are usually acceptable, as long as the chocolates aren’t in the form of a nude female torso, the wine doesn’t have a screw cap, and the flowers are real and don’t have a clump of roots and dirt hanging from them
– Extravagant jewelry purchases are excellent, unless you had to sell a kidney in order to buy it. If you did already, forget the wine (above).

Some tips for celebrating Valentine’s Day:

– There should be no television turned on while attempting to create a romantic mood. Ditto for the presence of any children, no matter how well behaved, or how soundly they appear to be sleeping.
– There should be candles. Anything here is fine, just don’t burn the house down. It’s just too hard to whisper sweet nothings over the sirens, axe chopping, hose spraying and firemen radio noise.
– There should be music. Not just any music of course. A good benchmark is if the song makes use of cowbells, heavy guitar distortion, spandex, (usually) accordion, excessive hair spray, righteous rock and roll screams (see: Won’t Get Fooled Again), spoons, and any use of a fiddle (however if it could be called a violin it could be acceptable. The exact border between violin and fiddle is incredibly hard to distinguish, but usually falls somewhere near the place you want to put down your snifter of cognac and kick off your slippers to start a frenetic River Dance on the coffee table while sweating out a quart of moonshine and beer.)

So there you go folks. Again, no guarantees for anyone that follows these tips. But you really could do worse, couldn’t you? I mean, come on you are searching the Internet for tips on wooing your loved one, this stuff may be just what you needed, right?