In theory, holidays provide a structured time in which you are allowed to express whatever sentiment the holiday is built on celebrating in such a way that, since it’s understood as a social constant, is less likely to conflict with the interests of those around you and/or your obligations from work. Ideally, the sentiments holidays are dedicated to would be felt and expressed subtly year round without need for reminders or excuses to make those sentiments explicit, but that would be a task the vast majority of people would be unable to remain dedicated to over time, and so having periodic reminders to continue expressing them is the ideal. Love in particular should be expressed year-round, and needing reminders of that doesn’t reflect well on a lot of people, but there still are valid practical reasons to have a day dedicated to it.

However, under capitalism, holidays have become incredibly easy to exploit in the name of profit; when your entire market has a predictable mood and desire at a given time, transforming the cause for that mood into a source of profit and by extension a paragon of materialist consumer frenzy becomes incredibly easy through advertisement, farse sales, and limited-time product lines, regardless of whatever lack of fulfillment the consumption of holiday-specific goods ultimately leads to on the part of consumers. Understanding this is key, because if you are aware of how corporations are trying to get you to behave on holidays, you become capable of resisting that attempt at manipulation through conscious effort and activism towards spreading your ideas regarding the issue while at the same time still being able to use the occasions for their intended practical purpose, instead of simply embracing or denouncing the concept of holidays outright, as the two present in this video do.

Very rarely are the radical poles of an issue correct, and as this video so potently illustrates, dialectical discussion starting from radical poles doesn’t always resolve into properly-structured wholes either; structural analysis of a given issue prior to debate is much more important.