Valentine's Day. One of the crassest celebrations ever invented, Lois thought savagely as she fought her way through what seemed like armies of dedicated purveyors of romance at the mall. As if it wasn't enough that every single shop in the place had windows full of huge red hearts and pink bows and cute teddy-bears, casual traders were everywhere with their stalls and carts, huge helium balloons floating above them.
Lois hated Valentine's Day even more than she hated Christmas. It was just so crassly consumerist, she had decided in her teenage years. Simply another excuse for Hallmark and other such companies to make a fortune - and as for the florists who doubled the price of their flowers and tripled the price of red roses, they were simply opportunist rip-off merchants. In her first year at the Planet, she had written a piece for the Saturday supplement on the fourteenth of February as a cynical marketing device - heck, they even had *kids* sending each other Valentine cards these days!
<Ah, but your dislike of Valentine's Day wouldn't have anything to do with the fact that you were never the one with lots of cards on the day when you were at school, would it?> the annoying voice of her conscience pointed out. She grimaced. She hadn't *wanted* them anyway - it was a stupid idea. But every year, reliable as clockwork, all the girls in her class would come into school boasting about how many they'd received and speculating on the identity of the senders... and even Lucy's count had extended into double figures by the time she was fifteen.
But she'd been at school then; somehow it seemed to her that adults should be more sensible, less prone to such childish stunts. And yet at work that day Cat had sidled up to her, a smug expression on her face as she'd smiled at Lois.
"So, Lois, doing anything special tomorrow?"
