Valentine's Day

Finding the perfect Valentine's Day gift is not always easy. Some people find the perfect gift and others are clueless.

In fact, I have personally experienced the phenomenon called crappy and useless gifts.

The first Valentine's Day my boyfriend and I spent together he made me a scrapbook featuring events we went through together in our first year. The second Valentine's Day together, he gave me, or should I say I gave myself, a dozen half-dead red roses from Target that I picked out.

Now, he is not a bad person. In fact he is a great boyfriend, but he is clueless when it comes to what this woman wants. But this year I made it clear: All I want is some homemade lasagna. So, loving boyfriend of mine, now you know and I better get it.

Now that I have shared my best and worst Valentine's Day gifts, here are some other students who were right on, and others who did not have a clue.

Good

"One Valentine's Day, I received a really pretty vase filled with a beautiful arrangement of two dozen roses," said Morgan Davis, an Ohio State alumna. "On the note was written, 'My love for you will endure until the last rose wilts.' Of course, at first when I read this I was thinking, 'Well that sucks! These roses will be dead and gone within the next week or two.' But then I was told to look a little more closely at the roses. He had placed one artificial rose amongst all the real ones."

"My best Valentine's Day present was a very nice gourmet homemade meal that my boyfriend cooked for me," said Emily Cortright, a graduate student in industrial and systems engineering. "After dinner, we went to his house and there was a trail of rose petals heading to the bedroom and the bed was full of rose petals and Hershey's Kisses."

"The best gift I've ever gotten on Valentine's Day was an engraved flask," said Josh Neptune, a senior in hospitality management. "Because the relationship is over and it's the one thing I still use."

"It was actually from my dad," said Ellen Conway, a sophomore in architecture. "He got me a shotgun. It was kind of random but I've always wanted one."

"The best Valentine's Day gift I've ever gotten was cologne," said David Kretch, a freshman in psychology. "Because that's something I wear every day and every time I wear it I think of the person who gave it to me."

Bad

"My worst Valentine's Day gift was when my boyfriend made me this little angel statue with glued-on roses," said Colleen Duffy, a senior in nursing. "I couldn't do anything with it and it was really ugly."

"When I was in high school my senior year, a girl got me a dozen flowers sent to the school in a vase," said Chris Hoying, a junior in mechanical engineering. "I walked around all day with them. I felt so awkward. It was too much."

"I've gotten a gift card before for Valentine's Day," said Marissa Tom, a junior in hospitality management. "I was like, 'Really, that requires no thought.' The worst was that it wasn't even from a store, it was one of those MasterCard ones."

"Not getting anything for Valentine's Day really sucked," said Cristina Vallejos, a senior in international studies and Spanish. "It didn't seem like Valentine's Day was special, that he just didn't care enough to get me anything."

"My worst gift was a Build-A-Bear in a soccer uniform," said Nick Zebroski, a senior in human development and family science. "And when you pushed the hand it said 'I love you.' Guys don't like bears; it's not manly."

Elyse Coulter can be reached at coulter.36@osu.edu.