It started as fiction. In a 2010 episode of Parks and Recreation, Leslie, creative and crafty and bursting with kindness for the people she loves, invented a way to do something American culture hadn’t traditionally been too good at doing: celebrating, in an official capacity, the joys of female friendship. Leslie set Galentine’s Day as a festival that would fall, each year, on February 13: Valentine’s Day-eve. And she decided that the festivities—though the real point of it all is simply to celebrate the platonic love that exists among ladyfriends—should take the form of the thing that has brought women together for decades: a long and boozy brunch.
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As Leslie explained it: “Every February 13, my ladyfriends and I leave our husbands and our boyfriends at home, and we just come and kick it, breakfast-style. Ladies celebrating ladies. It’s like Lilith Fair, minus the angst. Plus frittatas.”
Galentine’s Day was, in its initial conception, the character of Leslie Knope, fictional woman, realized in micro-holiday form: insistently earnest, aggressively generous, finding deeply canny methods of ensuring that every social occasion will involve the consuming of waffles.
But Galentine’s Day soon became popular among real-life women, too. The festival, after all, filled a need. It found a market. Like Friendsgiving before it, which was similarly coddled in the crucible of the sitcom, Galentine’s Day acknowledged a broad truth about American life as it’s lived in the early 21st century: Friendships, increasingly, are playing an organizing role in society. Long conceived as side dishes to the main feast—marriage, kids, the nuclear family above all—friendships, more and more, are helping to define people’s sense of themselves in the world. During a time of emergent adulthood and geographic mobility, friendships are lending stability—and meaning—to people’s, and especially young people’s, lives. The deepest friendships are operating not to replace the family unit, certainly, but to complement it.
With Galentine’s Day, Leslie Knope, fan of waffles and Ben Wyatt and Ann Perkins (though definitely not in that order), took all that cultural context and distilled it down into a holiday that, like Friendsgiving and Slapsgiving and Festivus before it, resonated far beyond its fictional world.
During a time of emergent adulthood and geographic mobility, friendships are helping to lend stability—and meaning—to people’s lives.
It caught on so well that, today, Galentine’s Day is a fairly standard celebration. No longer simply a micro-holiday, in the blink-and-you-miss-it manner of National Pizza Day or International Talk Like a Pirate Day, Leslie Knope’s lark is widely recognized and celebrated in places that are decidedly far from Pawnee, Indiana. Craft breweries have Galentine’s Day parties featuring crafts, beers, and—in a sweet hat-tip to the originator of the holiday—waffles. St. Martin’s press has a new book out for the occasion, BE MY GALENTINE: Celebrating Badass Female Friendship. Mashable recently listed “13 perfect Galentine’s Day gifts for your forever friends.” NPR offered a series of tips about how one might throw one’s own Galentine’s Day party. (The final piece of advice: “While eating waffles and drinking fizzy cocktails, celebrate the women in your life, Knope-style, by sharing with each one in attendance why you treasure her friendship.”)
Galentine’s Day has indeed become so well established that, last week, it earned itself that ultimate mark of cultural affirmation: a think piece, attempting to condemn its entire existence, in the New York Post. (“Ironically,” the story scoffed, “Feb. 13 has long been considered ‘Mistress Day,’ when unfaithful men take out their side chicks, leaving Feb. 14 for wives and girlfriends. Hope no one has any scheduling conflicts.”)
Perhaps the best measure of Galentine’s Day’s staying power, though? The fact that it is being used—as every great American holiday will be, in the end—to sell stuff. The most common criticism of Valentine’s Day, of course, is that it’s a Hallmark holiday. The day conflates romantic love with the plasticine detritus of that affection: expensive flowers, cheekily presented chocolates, chintzy stuffed animals.
So, too, Galentine’s Day, which has been, at this point, thoroughly Hallmarked. #GalentinesDay hashtags have been rampant on Twitter and Instagram in the days preceding February 13, directing people to lady-themed goods on websites and in stores. The site surfandsunshine has a blog post listing 9 Gift Ideas for Galentine’s Day; items for sale include a Ruth Bader Ginsburg mug, a Marie Curie doll, and—hey, Galentines, it’s not too late to buy me my present—a tote bag that dispenses wine.
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