Should an adult buy a Valentine's Day gift for his mother? I didn't know so I conducted an admittedly short and unscientific poll. The answer was a resounding no. But more on that in a bit.

Valentine's Day is a silly unremarkable holiday remembered only for a gangland mass-killing. A Hallmark holiday, its only reason to exist is to advance yet another excuse to spend money. How thoughtful a person is to remember to speak to someone on an engineered, artificial day. A day supposedly devoted to romantic love, it seeks to force lovers to think of one another. Presumably they wouldn't do that otherwise. As a side note, there were many St. Valentines, most of them priests. What a man devoted to celibacy has to say about romantic love, I cannot say.

But suppose one gets sucked in, against his will, into the hysteria. What is an appropriate gift? I don't think it's useful to purchase some random plush doll assembled by Chinese children. Candy? No, that's fattening. I know, a bouquet of flowers. Nothing says I love you like a crippled, sterilized, and slowly bleeding to death houseplant. Why not buy something useful? A steak, maybe. Some beer. A brake job. An even better idea. Buy that person you love something special on some other day, just to show you care.

Back to the adult-mother gift buying. The prevailing opinion I received from those I polled (those sitting next to me at the bar) was that Valentine's Day, being (we're told) about romantic love, makes parental gifts just a tad creepy. Maybe not in West Virginia, but I'm not here to pass judgement. Though if you're in one of those families maybe a useful gift would be the services of an accountant to sort out the complicated web of child support payments.