Valentine's Day Quandary and Sale
Spread the Love Potion
Hello beautiful people! Happy Love Month!
Love Month Sale
I’m going to cut to the chase. February is LOVE MONTH at Nymph and Woodsman! So hop on over to our site and get 20% off EVERYTHING automatically at checkout. All. Month. Long. And—just for the occasion—we have made a tasty Spread the Love Potion and Beloved, a new bath salt blend featuring some of our favorite calming and heart-opening herbs and flowers. Treat yourself and a beloved or two! We can send gifts directly to your loves.
Valentine’s Day Quandary
Mid-way through January I suggested to Seth that we have a Valentine’s day sale, knowing that folks would be looking for gifts for their sweethearts and wanting to make our offerings of love and beauty extra accessible. Seth wasn’t into the idea, not wanting to participate in the rampant and sticky sweet commercialism that February is all about.
I had mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, my childhood associations with Valentine’s Day were wonderful. My mom helped me host parties and we made heart-shaped Jello Knox Blox and lots and lots of cards made out of red and pink construction paper and paper doilies. We shared gifts with our family and had a special dinner. For our family, it was just another excuse for celebration, something we all love. So Valentine’s Day was simply about friends, family, and love… and I loved it!
As I got older, though, the holiday became more complex. If I was single, which I was for most of my 20s, Valentine’s Day just felt like salt in the ever-growing wound that my singleness felt like. And when I was in a relationship for most of 30s with a deeply unromantic person, I rejected the day entirely so I wouldn’t be hurt when it was not acknowledged.
Love Machine
In the years that followed that breakup, I lit out on a deliberate journey of being and spreading love. I have no idea if I did anything for Valentine’s Day at all during those years, but I do know that I treated every day as an opportunity to honor myself with the kind of love and affection I hoped a partner would eventually offer me. I was romantic with myself—I lit my cabin with candles in the evenings and danced to records. I played loved songs on my banjo. I listened to myself deeply and paid attention to my needs. I soaked naked in a hot-spring-fed clawfoot tub in the meadow near my cabin and learned to truly love the curves that society had long ago convinced me were unacceptable.
I was my own Valentine day after day for four years, and when I met Seth, I was ready to love and be loved in a way I had only dreamt about. We immediately connected on our joint life mission to cultivate community and spread love and beauty by doing what we love. And that includes loving each other well day by day. We have, however, pretty much ignored Valentine’s Day because it’s come to feel like a sickly sweet day laden with expectations springing from TVs and glossy magazines. And that’s been fine with me.
And yet, as a business, it feels wise, necessary even, to reap the benefits of gift-giving holidays by making products and offering sales in honor of them. And, jeez! With a mission of spreading LOVE and BEAUTY, it would seem that Valentine’s day would be our jam!
Commercializing Imbolc Instead?
The Quickening
“How about celebrating Imbolc, instead?” I asked. Seth and I both loved the idea at first. This Pagan holiday begins today, February 1st, and goes through sundown on February 2nd. It falls about halfway between the Winter Solstice and Spring Equinox, and is also known as “the quickening,” Candlemas, St. Brigid’s Day, and the celebration of the Celtic goddess Brighid. Like the first movement of a babe in a pregnant person’s womb, Imbolc reminds us that life is indeed stirring beneath the wintery surface of the earth’s curved belly. Even though we can’t see it, seeds are cracking open, green shoots are slowly working their way toward the surface, and the increasing light is calling them home.
The goddess Brighid was a patron of fertility, poetry, the hearth, and blacksmithing. Sacred wells were visited in her honor on Imbolc and decorated with greens. She invites us to celebrate the transformative power of fire, the cleansing and reflective nature of water, and the rebirth that is available to us all when we engage our fertile minds and creative wells.
So celebrating Imbolc instead of Valentine’s Day felt much more Nymph and Woodsman-y to us. But then the ew of commercializing ancient earth-based holidays quickly set in. Oy! It’s tricky being business owners who want to make a living from selling our products but aren’t fans of commercialism.
Love Month It Is!
Beloved Soaking Blend
And so we’ve decided to celebrate it all—Valentine’s day, mid-winter, “the quickening”, Candlemas, St. Brigid’s Day, the goddess Brighid, and Imbolc! We WANT to spread our love and beauty far and wide. We WANT you to buy our love and wellness potions, soaking blends, CBD products, wellbeing tinctures, and soothing oils and salves! We WANT you to gift yourself and your beloveds the deliciousness of our offerings.
And we hope that—no matter what holiday you celebrate this month—you take time to celebrate yourSELF. That you offer your body the pleasures and rest it desires, your mind the stimulation it craves, and your soul the affection it yearns for. And then, all filled up with your own big love, we hope that you let it flow into your beloveds.
Black History Month
Quite importantly, it’s also Black History Month. And in honor of THAT, we will be donating 5% of February’s profits to the Portland-based Equitable Giving Circle. This organization has an incredible model for getting food and resources directly to BIPOC folks who need it most. So help us love up BIPOC communities by loving up yourself and your beloveds!
Alright beauties, take care of yourself during this time. Nap, sip tea, walk outside, laugh with beloveds, nap some more.
In big love and beauty, xoxo Becca
