Does your family celebrate Valentine’s Day?

I know that Valentine’s Day has been so commercialized already, just like Christmas, but I still believe that it’s nice to celebrate this day. We can even choose to celebrate the whole month. Of course, it would be best to express our love to our loved ones each day of the year.

But being extra expressive and affectionate on this month doesn’t hurt.

So much emphasis has been put on romantic love on Valentine’s Day. But I think we should also celebrate all kinds of love like the love of God for us, the love of parents for their children and vice versa, the love between siblings, the love between friends aside from the love between lovers and spouses.

It would be nice to receive lavish gifts from the ones we love. But expressing love doesn’t always need to be in the form of costly gifts. A lot of times, intangible gifts make the most impact.

I wrote a blog post titled 7 Valentine Activities You Can Do with Your Kids before. You might want to check it out for more options and ideas.

In this post, I’d like to share additional simple but meaningful ways to celebrate Valentine’s Day or Valentine’s Month with your family.

• My number one favorite bonding with my kids that is simple and relatively easy or doable to do and does not need to cost money is READING BOOKS. Do you know that Valentine’s Day is also International Book-Giving Day? If you have extra budget and if your bookcases are not yet bursting with books, you can buy books as gifts to your loved ones this month. I’ve done this in the past years. This year, I didn’t buy new ones because we already have so many books and I want us to revisit those wonderful books that tell stories about love. Some of the books I read to my children this Valentine’s Day and this week were Guess How Much I love You, I’d Choose You and Love You Forever. I also plan to read God’s Favorite Face and my first children’s book Mommy Loves You Just the Same. All these books can make my children feel loved not just by me but also by God.

• EATING TOGETHER is another simple but meaningful way to celebrate family love. Do you know that the more family dinners or meals that you eat with your children, the more that they will feel loved and they will be least likely to have behavioral problems? Yet, this simple activity is becoming more and more challenging to do for many modern families. Each family member is becoming more and more busy with many things, including young students. There are so many activities outside the home and so little time left for family members to really talk and eat together. I’m grateful that we get to do this a lot in our family because we homeschool and I work from home almost all the time. In the past year, my husband has been home also most of the time because he just started his own business. This Valentine’s Day, we just ate together at home. My husband also cooked heart-shaped pancakes for us for breakfast. We shared a home-cooked meal which my husband and I prepared. I had not been able to cook often lately because of my deadlines at work so I made sure to cook for my family on Valentine’s Day. We ate donuts and chocolates for our afternoon snack. Eating together at home is not only budget-friendly. It also allows you to escape from horrible traffic and long lines at restaurants that usually happen on Valentine’s Day. 😉 In the past couple of years, we ate together as a family in nearby restaurants only so as not to be stuck in traffic for long periods.

• FAMILY MOVIE TIME is another favorite of our kids and my husband to bond with each other. You can make or buy popcorn and pizza if you want. That’s still less costly than going to the cinema, especially if you have a big family. Even small children need to pay in full. This year, we watched a family movie on Netflix that the kids have not seen yet. It’s not a romantic movie but a movie that celebrates friendship, another form of love that is more relevant to our kids.

• PRAYING TOGETHER is one of the daily bonding activities we have as a family. We believe that a family that prays together stays together. We usually read the Bible daily and pray our night prayers as a family. We also do our best to go to Mass as a family on Valentine’s Day. This year, we did not only attend Mass together, our eldest son served in the Mass also as a pianist.

• We made time to talk about WHAT WE LOVE ABOUT EACH OTHER after we had lunch. Even our two older children told me and my husband what they love about us and what they love that we do for them. They also shared what they love about their youngest brother. It didn’t cost us anything except our time and our honesty and sincerity. At some points, I got teary-eyed listening to them and talking about what I love about them. This activity surely filled our love tanks! Try it! It’s not yet too late! February is just halfway.

• Last but not least, you might want to ask your children to answer a worksheet titled I LOVE MYSELF. I just gave a talk to the singles of Unilab last February 13. One of the things I shared in my talk is that we need to learn to love ourselves first to be able to love others well. It starts from healthy self-love. This exercise will help your children and you and your spouse if you answer this also to remind yourselves or to discover what is it about you that you love. You can make your own worksheet or search the internet for similar worksheets or you can use this one that I made. I included here what the child/person loves about himself, about his body and what he loves that he can do.

These are also budget-friendly and easy to do activities that can be integrated into our busy family schedules. In fact, I think, these are what one of my mentors (the late Stephen Covey)calls BIG ROCKS that should be scheduled first in our calendars to make sure that they will happen not only during the Love Month but all year through. =)

I hope these ideas would help you and your family members feel more loved!

Happy Valentine’s!