The Retrospect by Ada Cambridge — Read

There is always one outstanding association to fly in your face ahead of every other when you encounter a thing or person once connected with your life, that has been severed from it for a long time. And when I looked at the front door like a church door, simultaneously apprehending its interesting character as a door, the first thing I thought of was -- valentines.

The word says nothing to my youthful reader. But, oh, dear contemporary for whom especially I write, you who took part with me in those revels that are no more, what it says to us! Certainly our diversions of that time -- when we were hardly into our teens, and when we were as innocent as we were young -- were so few and simple compared with those of our children at the same age that we got more out of one of them than they do out of a miscellaneous dozen; but I am allowing for that when I say that for this particular diversion, and one or two more of a like kind, no corresponding diversion of the present day offers anything like adequate compensation. There are bloodless creatures, that forget they were ever young, who point to the Christmas card as the improved substitute for our valentine. Christmas card, indeed! So common, so obvious, so lacking in individual human interest! What nonsense!