The Little Red-Haired Girl is some time off, but still, this is the first time Charlie Brown is depressed from getting no valentines. It's got a "chagrimace" and everything.
Aren't school valentines a shamefully artificial thing these days anyway? In order to prevent kids from feeling rejected, I seem to remember that we were encouraged to just give one to everyone in class, regardless of gender.
When we had valentine exchanges in grade school, everyone took great pains to give valentines to *everyone* in the class, regardless of gender or even whether you liked them. It was considered bad form to exclude anyone... and when it happened, it was usually by accident.
ReplyDeleteFar more analogous to CB's situation were roses that were exchanged in high school on Valentine's Day. For a fee (which usually went to some extracurricular activity), you could send a red rose to a sweetheart, a rose to a friend (only girls did that), or a "secret admirer" rose (a prank half of the time). Naturally, the popular kids went home with armfuls of roses, and everyone else was happy to get one or two.