Come on in! We're having a special on 2002 Valentine's Day gifts!

So say it. By talking, not by impoverishing yourself.

It’s tough to determine whether Mothers Day or Valentine’s Day is the biggest crock of garbage on the retail liturgical calendar. After a few seconds of weighing this, we’ll go with Mothers Day. At least Valentine’s Day has been celebrated for centuries*.

This isn’t an anti-capitalistic jeremiad. Spend all the money you want, but at least spend it on something of value. Look, we’re not sociologists. Nor are we in that camp of reactionaries who think that consumerism and its sidekick, advertising, are the work of the devil. But come on. If you’ve seen the messages and feel even a hint of obligation toward spending money on something with minimal inherent value, we can come over there and slap you if that’s what it takes. There are plenty of Western customs you can honor (shaking hands, exhibiting good table manners, failing to torture cats) without throwing money away.

Just look at the slogans:

Helzberg Diamonds: “I am loved.”

Ergo, any woman who isn’t in a relationship with a Helzberg customer is being taken for granted and/or treated like garbage.

It’s the same as that “2 months’ salary” rule of thumb that jewelers came up with sometime in the mid-20^th century and somehow got a grossly gullible public to swallow. Think about that for a second – an industry suggests that you should spend 1/6 of your annual income on its product, and people take it to heart.

Imagine if an industry that produces something far more useful – like groceries, or better yet, health insurance – tried to get away with that reasoning.

Seriously. Mental exercise time. What if an HMO used a similar tactic?

Hi. We’re your friends at CIGNA. Do you have enough protection against unforeseen accidents and illnesses? You never know when disaster might strike you or your loved ones, and possibly turn into tragedy. That’s why we recommend that you spend at least 10% of your pre-tax income on coverage. It’s a small price to pay to minimize the childhood leukemia deaths in your family.

The only question is which senator would chair the 2011 hearings on Unconscionable Advertising Messages Foisted By A Mercenary Industry On The Public. Our money’s on Chuck Schumer.

If you want to listen to a jeweler’s message, Zales’ slogan from the 1940s is particularly forthright, especially if you contemporize it for inflation – “A penny down and a dollar a week.”

The practice of buying jewelry, especially at this time of year, is the loudest and most imbecilic real-world rebuttal of Control Your Cash Mantra #1 – bolded, italicized and underlined here for your pleasure: Buy assets, sell liabilities.

Finance something if there’s a legitimate economic reason for it – the example we give repeatedly is homebuying. If you want a house, better to finance it than to pay rent for years and years when you could have been enjoying a home on credit. Even if your circumstances lead you to disagree with that sentiment – you live in an area with a chronically poor housing market, or your data indicates that it’ll become one before you plan to move out of any house you might buy – you have to agree that at least a house has utility. Financing a car is harder to justify than financing a house, but again, utility: we still haven’t developed a more efficient way to get from point A to point B at your leisure (assuming points A and B are on land) than by driving.

Where’s the utility in a non-industrial diamond? You’re not going to use it as a drill bit. No, it’s a totem of some emotion that you can only truly convey with actions, not expensive objects.

We’d include a chart showing how much what you spent on that tennis bracelet could grow to over the next x years, but you’ve seen similar charts before and the inevitable conclusion is so obvious that it doesn’t require mathematical reinforcement.

If you don’t care about your future together, act like you mean it: by dropping money on – or better yet, financing – a shiny trinket.

And ladies, if you need a bauble to validate your relationship, or your man, you’re one step above your colleagues whose husbands smoke cigars. (Why not just wear a button that says, “With all the tasty parts of me available to put in his mouth, he instead chooses the foulest-smelling thing this side of the public toilets in Calcutta. No, no hypermasculine phallic symbolism to see here”?)

Look, moments don’t sparkle. And if they do, it’s only a figure of speech. A Vermont Teddy Bear might not be imaginative, but it’s fun to hold. More importantly, the recipient isn’t going to wear it in public – making it a private token of a relationship that you shouldn’t be sharing with the rest of us anyway. And, the one we researched on their website costs only $80.

*If you care about this kind of arcana, the idea that the Hallmark Corporation created Mothers Day is an urban legend. Mothers Day is the brainchild of Anna Jarvis, a 19^th century woman who wanted to honor her own mother. Jarvis mère spent the Civil War attending to wounded soldiers, both Blue and Gray. Jarvis fille, as women often do, kept pestering the authorities to make the holiday official. She died poor and childless.

**This post is featured in the Carnival of Wealth #27**