Having gone through a couple of disastrous Valentine’s Days over the past 13 years, my partner and I don’t really celebrate the holiday. We usually go out for dinner and celebrate Martin Luther King Day instead, both because we find it to be a much more valuable commemoration and because it’s closer to the anniversary of the start of our relationship.

At any rate, this year we decided to do something a little different: we went to a church dinner. The town Church of the Brethren was having a spaghetti dinner on Saturday night, donations only, that included live music. Our friends were game to join us, so we dubbed the evening a Friendship Day celebration and away we went.

The dinner itself was actually very nice, with tasty food and a warm atmosphere. The folks putting it together had worked hard on all the details: there were flowers, candy dishes, pink and red lights, and all the servers were wearing lace-trimmed heart-shaped aprons. If the Peace Pole outside the front door hadn’t been enough to sway us, this last—seeing a middle-aged man cheerily taking orders in a lace-trimmed heart-shaped apron—led to the consensus at the table that ‘these are good people.’ The music was by Don’t Tell Bob, an area band who played a mix of spirituals and folk songs that leaned toward what I would call bluegrass but may have a different designation out here.

All in all, it was a nice evening. As he commented when we got home: it was the kind of thing we would have been mortified to be seen at with our parents as teenagers, gone to in our early twenties because we couldn’t afford anything else, been too busy out living it up a few years ago to be bothered with, and that we now both genuinely enjoyed now.

So, I hope you had a warm and happy Friendship Day. I know we did!