Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 34, Number 46, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 February 1902 — Coarse Valentines. [ARTICLE]

Coarse Valentines.

Many a sensitive child’s feelings have been hurt by receiving a coarse valentine ridiculing, it may be, some infirmity or fault the child is faithfully trying to overcome. Miss Harrison, in her mothers’ class in this city, urged mothers to discountenance in every way that they could the buying or Sending of coarse, vulgar caricatures known as “comic valentines.” “The right attitude,” said she, “of the child is that of reverence or looking up. All that takes the bloom off of life injures the child’s growth. Comic valentinea are not only coarse and low, but they give wrong, impressions of life to the child, and thereby injure his intellectual growth as well as his spiritual fineness of fiber. “To prevent a desire for them, begin by telling the story of the life of the man who was so good and true and unselfish, whose aims were so high and whose purpose was so noble that after his death the people who had known him or who had known of him loved to speak of him as St. Valentine. Next show how it gradually became the custom to send little tokens of affection, messages of cheer and of remembrance by way of celebrating this saint’s birthday. See that the desire thus aroused finds outlet with the child in the right kind of valentines purchased and made. I.et him send them to the people he loves. The valentines which are made by the child are. as a rule, more healthful than those that are purchased by the mother for him.” Miss Harrison then showed several pretty ways of folding and cutting the old-fashioned valentines used in our grandmothers’ days. \ “If this plan Is carried out,” continued she, “I think you will have little need to forbid the purchasing of the coarser article. The incongruousness of the thing will show Itself to the child. Remember that the grotesque lends into the coarse; the coarse into the impure: the impure into the obscene.”—Western Rural.