Blooms & Bliss: A Brief Valentine's Day Special
Vonda and Lori know exactly where you are right now: elbow-deep in roses, mid-Valentine's chaos. So this week's episode is deliberately short and sweet — a couple of laugh-out-loud stories and a round of little-known Valentine's Day facts you can enjoy while you're greening containers or finally putting your feet up on the 15th.
First, the runaway ski
Lori is just back from a ski trip, and the one injury of the week is a story for the ages. She took a gentle fall high on the mountain, then couldn't find her left ski anywhere. Meanwhile, far below, her husband Mark — who had been feeling "pretty sassy and cocky" that day — suddenly wiped out so hard he thought another human being had hit him. Two skiers pulled up to check on him and delivered the punchline: "Dude, how are you skiing with three skis?" Her ski had popped off, rocketed down the mountain, and taken him out — a million-to-one shot. Lori laughed the entire walk down. Mark's verdict, softball-sized bruise and all: "Maybe we're getting too old for this."
Two first Valentines
Vonda's most memorable Valentine's Day is one every florist will feel in their bones. She'd worked the holiday since age 14, and one year — married, new baby — she came home around seven o'clock after a full shop day and handed her then-husband a box of candy and a card. His response: "Today's Valentine's?"
Lori's story goes back to sixth grade, the late '70s, and a boy named Drew — nicknamed "little baby drawers" by his Southern mama. They were "going steady," which meant never making eye contact. On Valentine's evening the doorbell rang: Drew, a head shorter than Lori, flanked by his six-foot older brother (who was dating Lori's sister), holding a bag of Hershey's Kisses in a red plaid Hallmark bag with a heart cut out by his sisters. The card — clearly written by those sisters — said "Dear Lori, here are some kisses for you." When Lori's sister read it aloud, Drew bolted, Lori fled to her room, and the whole living room howled. Traumatizing then; treasured now. (They're still friends today — as Vonda points out, think how brave little baby drawers had to be.)
Little-known Valentine's facts
Vonda came armed with research, and the trivia lands close to home for anyone selling love for a living:
- Hershey makes more than 80 million chocolate Kisses every day — year-round, not just for the holiday. Kisses lead the candy rankings, with M&Ms second and Reese's peanut butter cups third.
- St. Valentine's Day dates to around 500 AD. Some historians trace it to a third-century Roman priest who secretly married couples in defiance of the emperor, and the church replaced an earlier Roman fertility festival — one where legend says women's names went into an urn to be drawn by men, who then wrote the name on their arm. That's one story behind "wearing your heart on your sleeve."
- The oldest known valentine was written from prison. Charles, Duke of Orleans, imprisoned in the Tower of London at 21, wrote his wife a poem opening "My very gentle Valentine."
- Juliet still gets mail. Thousands of letters arrive in Verona, Italy every year, and volunteers from the Juliet Club dutifully answer them.
- Conversation hearts began as throat lozenges. Oliver Chase invented a lozenge machine, pivoted to candy (the famous Necco wafers), his brother added the printed messages, and the heart shape arrived in 1901. Today roughly 100,000 pounds are produced daily — about 8 billion hearts a year — nearly all sold in the six weeks between January 1 and Valentine's Day. As the hosts note with some envy: candy makers get to produce all year for one season, while florists work with a perishable product and no such luxury.
- The word "lace" comes from the Latin for snare — as in ensnaring someone's heart.
- The volume is staggering: about 36 million heart-shaped boxes of chocolate and 145 million valentine cards each year — Hallmark says only Christmas beats it for cards.
- Galentine's Day is real — and huge. Born on Parks and Recreation courtesy of Leslie Knope, friend-to-friend celebration spending has roughly tripled since 2010 to $1.6 billion. Lori's take: the world needed Galentine's Day, and shops should embrace that friendship market.
Key takeaways
- Galentine's Day spending has tripled to $1.6 billion — friendship flowers are a real category worth marketing.
- Valentine's trivia makes great social and counter conversation; customers love the stories behind the traditions.
- Unlike conversation-heart makers with a year to build stock, florists compress everything into days — plan, prep, and forgive yourself the chaos.
- However the holiday goes, do better than "Today's Valentine's?" — and take your rest on the 15th.