Getting a Valentine’s Day carnation in class was so cute … unless you were one of the kids that didn’t get one.
Carnations have a reputation for hardiness, but when Valentine’s Day rolls around, they can transform kids—and nostalgic adults—into delicate flowers. This was the case for 44-year-old writer Amber Sparks, who tweeted about her unpleasant childhood carnation memories last Valentine’s Day.
“Do you guys remember in middle school when you could buy carnations for people to be delivered in homeroom, and the popular people got a ton, and the normal people had like one,” she wrote. “… the rest of us weirdos had to sit there while our school engaged in active bullying, a day for love.”
A lot of people did remember this, it turned out—a year later, Sparks’ tweet has over 250,000 likes. I followed the conversation at the time, watching a tide of “Yeah, that was kind of messed up” swell over the course of the day, along with a chorus of recollections of how carnations ruined people’s adolescent lives. “I didn’t remember until right now, and then I felt that gut punch like I did back then when I didn’t get anything,” one person replied. “Thanks for the trigger,” wrote another.
Plenty of people defended the tradition, too. Sparks got nasty emails asking her what she had against fundraisers and calling her a loser, along with some fair criticisms pondering whether “bullying” was the right term for the situation. “I’ve never had people more mad at me than they were for that tweet,” she said.
Clearly, carnations—and candygrams, roses, singing telegrams, or whatever item schools sell in the lead-up to Valentine’s Day (or another holiday)—can inspire some strong feelings. But did this annual torture ritual—which seemed perfectly acceptable 20 years ago despite terrorizing generations of children—ever evolve to fit the times, or are we still stuck in the carnation-giving dark ages?
It’s really more of the latter. Typically, a club at school—often no one can recall which club or for what reason—will sell the carnations or candy in advance of the holiday for a dollar or two as a fundraiser, and the flowers usually come with a to/from slip so the receiver can tell who sent them. Sometimes, the flowers have color-coded meanings that vary from school to school: A white carnation stands for friendship (or a secret admirer), pink might be a crush, and red is usually love. On the holiday or close to it, the flowers are distributed in public, often during homeroom. If you’ve seen Mean Girls, you know how this goes: In the movie, it’s Christmas, not Valentine’s Day, and a student dressed as Santa bursts into a classroom. “Ho, ho, ho, ho, ho! Candy cane–grams!,” he says. He hands out pieces of candy from a bag for all to see, giving us the indelible line, “Four for you, Glen Coco! You go, Glen Coco!” Meanwhile, poor Gretchen Weiners gets nothing, a fact Santa explicitly points out.
In the Victorian era, carnations stood for various kinds of love, which explains why we give them the Glen Coco treatment on Valentine’s Day. Some sources even claim that carnations were used to respond to secret admirers—solid colors meant “yes;” striped flowers meant “unfortunately, no.” How this floriography made its way into American schools isn’t entirely clear, though there are newspaper references to carnations being sent by secret admirers at school events dating back to the 1940s. By the 1970s, the ritual evolved into something resembling the popularity-contests–via–holiday-greetings we know today, but the majority the people I spoke to have memories of them from the 1990s and 2000s.
Krista Clark, a 36-year-old health care administrator in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, has a classic story of carnation-assisted heartache. One year, she bought a pink one for a boy she liked. “I remember being in gym class and just being so anxious,” she told me—it was around the time they were going to be handed out. She was hoping the crush was mutual and that there would be a pink flower in her future.
“I didn’t get one, so like I was kind of like, ‘All right, I guess that’s a clue,’ ” Clark said. The boy was nice about it, though—they had a class where they sat next to each other, and he explained that he had a girlfriend who went to another school. It wasn’t the end of the world, but Clark felt rejected. “I definitely felt those feelings. It was the one day of the year where you kind of felt like it was thrown in your face that you were single.”
Thirty-six-year-old New Jerseyan D’Arcy Sarnelle went through something similar. “My freshman year, it happened, and I remember feeling really depressed and emo about it,” she told me. “I felt super self-conscious about not receiving any.” This motivated her to come up with a plan for the following Valentine’s Day.
“My sophomore year, I joined the student government so I could volunteer to distribute them. That way, if I didn’t get any, it wasn’t as big of a deal,” she said. “I told my mom about it, and to give me a boost, she made me this button, like this big badge to wear, that said ‘Carnation Fairy’ on it.”
Being a carnation fairy made the whole thing go down easier, and by junior and senior year, Sarnelle felt more confident in herself and less worried about the flowers.
Meanwhile, at Annie Swingen’s high school in Madison, Wisconsin, there were carnations and candy, but the bigger deal was singing telegrams. For $5, a few choir singers would come to your chosen’s classroom and do an a cappella performance in front of everyone.
“I sent a few to friends to embarrass them,” Swingen, who’s in her 40s, told me. “And then I remember my senior year, I got a couple of them. It was very embarrassing. It was terrible.”
Actually, it was terrible in an entirely different way than the carnations—not only were you being singled out, but the whole thing felt like a day-long act of disobedience, with classes being repeatedly interrupted for performances. “Our senior year, we’d try to fill up the whole time so you’d just have people coming in one after another to sing,” Swingen said. Looking back on it, she said the whole thing felt like a ‘90s movie.
But for some kids, it also felt like a nightmare, particularly for those questioning their sexuality. That was the case for Dana, a 36-year-old librarian in New Jersey (who didn’t want to use her full name for this story). At her school, they did chocolate roses. “I received a chocolate rose from a secret admirer, and it was actually super embarrassing,” she said. “I think I was still figuring out being queer, and this was clearly a boy/girl situation.” She never found out who the secret admirer was, but remembers throwing the rose in the trash.
But despite their various humiliations, Sparks suspects that the intensely social—if not occasionally problematic—presentation of the carnations is what draws people to them in the first place. “That’s the secret thing about this,” she said. “Nobody would actually have bought a stupid carnation for their friend if they just picked it up after school and no one saw it. It wasn’t about having the carnation; it was about showing that Jessica or whoever had more friends than anyone else.”
Sparks now has a 7-year-old daughter, and said she’d have very mixed feelings if her school decided to foist Valentine’s Day carnations upon her. “I’ve told my husband there’s a few things that I reserve the right to make a fuss about and that’s one,” she continued. “I swear to God, if I hear this is happening at my daughter’s school, I will be on the phone to the school demanding justice.”
Still, many schools continue to sell carnations and candygrams despite their obvious drawbacks. “It’s absolutely going on, and it’s actually growing,” said Karin Geiger, sales director at Flowers for Fundraising, a Maine-based company that sells floral products to schools. “It’s everywhere from preschool all the way up through high school.”
When Geiger and I spoke a few weeks before Valentine’s Day, she said her company had received 1,600 bulk carnation orders from schools and expected about 1,000 more, all of which it’ll source and ship directly from farms in the U.S. and South America. That said, she’s has noticed that schools have been trying to downplay the romantic element of flower sales in recent years. “We’re trying to get away from it just being all about love,” she told me.
That makes sense—the love thing can be a rude awakening for kids. Kate, who teaches middle school in New York (and didn’t want to use her last name), told me about how her fifth-graders reacted to news of the carnation sale. “When we read the announcements, and it’s like, ‘You can get one for your boyfriend or girlfriend,’ everyone just kind of like, ‘Whoa,’ she said. “You get a big reaction the first time we read it.” “I usually just change it to ‘someone that you care about.’ ” she added.
Kate has seen students get left out, though. She’s also witnessed students specifically icing each other out just to be jerks. “When I started teaching, I was really surprised that this is actually a thing that happens,” she said. “Why would we be setting ourselves up for bullying when we’re trying to stop bullying?”
She also pointed out that not only does the practice reward the popular kids, it’s controlled by them, too. “It’s run by the student council, which at the middle school level, is just a popularity contest,” she continued. “The people that are in charge got elected because they’re the cool kids. It’s giving social hierarchy from a very early age.”
Paul Eger, a band teacher at a Long Island high school, said he’s “seen a little anxiousness on the kids’ faces if they’re hoping to get one. I’ve seen some kids devastated. I’ve seen kids be smug about it. It’s really the whole gamut.”
In addition to carnations, Eger’s school has a program, Valentunes, that’s like singing telegrams except with instruments, where for $2, kids can send a troupe of student musicians to someone’s classroom. “Careless Whisper” is a perennially popular request, Eger said.
In his experience, the carnations tend to cause more bad feelings than Valentunes, but Eger thinks some unpleasantness is inevitable either way. “My personal belief is that no matter what happens, someone’s going to be disappointed,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be a carnation. It could be anything, and it could be a non-school-run event, and I think there would still be people that have experienced those feelings on that day.”
On top of all this, Sparks also worried about kids who can’t afford to send carnations to their crush (or themselves, as she admitted to doing one year). This is a topic that Mike Randolph, the principal of Leesburg High School in Florida, has thought about a fair amount. It’s a school with a high population of low-income students, and Randolph told me that students who can’t afford to buy carnations can request funding from a program at the school that provides financial support to students. But it’s not very common to do so, especially since the flowers only cost a dollar. He said that in past years, the school has told students that anyone could pick up a carnation, even if no one bought one for them, so that no one felt left out. His school also distributes the carnations gradually throughout the day in an effort to make things less showy.
Some people might be surprised to learn that despite all the fuss they cause, carnations aren’t big moneymakers. “It’s not the most effective because we charge such a minimal fee for it,” Randolph said. “If we made $500 this year on the fundraiser, that would be a surprise to me.” As for why it’s worth doing, “especially as we returned from COVID, our students are looking for a sense of normalcy,” he said.
Still, there’s at least one school that’s decided the carnations weren’t worth the anguish. Last year, 17-year-old Lily Zuckerman wrote an article for her school paper with the scoop that the Masters School in Dobbs Ferry, New York was ending its carnation sale. Her article cited environmental reasons—flowers overall are not very eco-friendly—but also hinted at hurt feelings. “I think it was definitely both things,” Zuckerman, a junior, told me.
When she was in ninth grade and only got the carnation that the head of school sent to everyone, she felt left out. “It made me feel like I didn’t have a lot of friends,” she said. “There was some girl who got seven. That was awful. She would just flaunt it, and then you’d see her post about it on her [Instagram] Story.”
Zuckerman said some of her classmates were peeved that they didn’t do the sale last year, but she was relieved. Still, she has a little more perspective now that she’s an upperclassman. “Honestly, ninth-grade me was really upset about the carnations, but thinking about it now, it’s really not that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things.”
Well, you know what they say: Roses are red, violets are blue, and when it comes to carnations, everyone’s got a point of view.
English (United States) ·