Valentine’s Day is my favorite celebration, and yes, I know it isn’t a holiday, it is a marketing event. While it seems so commercial today, I am surprised to discover it has always been about marketing! In the late 1800s, Richard Cadbury needed to sell more chocolates to use his company’s cocoa butter surplus. Victorians were great fans of Valentine’s Day; they expressed their love in elaborate greeting cards (postage was affordable.) Chocolate became available to the masses (sugar had become cheaper), so Cadbury created a moment of marketing magic, the heart-shaped chocolate box. This beautiful box was sold as a dual-purpose gift because after your sweetheart ate the chocolates, she could use the heart-shaped box to store love letters and romantic mementos.1 In the US, Hershey chocolates made their famous kisses in 1907 continuing the romantic alliance.2
Category: Africa
Green, Flower and Fruit, what all gardeners want,
As gardeners something in our soul calls to us whether on our own street or halfway around world on a small street in Casablanca Morocco. We have need to plunge our hands into the soil, creating a place to grow something even in the most challenging conditions. The life in a green plant signals to us that there is a larger beautiful world we are part of. The color of the flowers brightens our own view of the world. The fruit of the plant is the reward of all the elements of nature working together. The produce provides us the food to eat, to share at our table.