The count down has began. Many of you might have done nothing so far to present your lover, wife (in that order) with a gift for the Valentines day that is very close by and will close by midnight on 14 February 2009.
Since I am also one like you, I squeezed the gray matter below the skull and scratched the gray matter above the skull (I have gray matter above the skull since I don’t lie or dye - I live) thinking of ways and means to convey the “no means” story to my lover and wife (in my case they are one and the same, I don’t know about you).
As most of us do these days, I ran to the 24×7x365 pharmacy for remedy. Yes! I Googled if there are helpful tips to tide over this expense Tsunami called Valentines Day Gift. Google, didn’t yield to my search. Thus, I understood, it is a larger problem than one would have imagined.
If you are married, it is a double whammy. You use your card to buy an expensive gift for your wife. At the same time, she will use the add on card you gifted her in one of those “I am still in love with you” Valentines’ days to buy an “expensier” gift for you so she remained “one up” on you.
(Note: Expensier is a word that has not YET entered the dictionary. It is brand new; released by me for this Valentines day. My another hobby is coining new words. I have been pursuing this hobby since my school days. Ask my English Teachers. They had to release a new dictionary for all the old words I re-coined with new spelling. A lot of times, I was industrious enough to come up with multiple spellings for the same word thus creating new words in the process. My teachers opined that I had good chemistry with English which showed that not only me, even they, showed signs of not being good in science. One more example for me being good at coining new words is in the title of this post!).
1. Tell her that you wanted to buy her a red hot red heart, but had to by-pass it as red was replaced by pink everywhere at the office and it was difficult to be in the pink of cheers
2. Tell her that you lost the vallet (with all the plastic) and hence had to deactivate all the cards. Ensure that you have also run out of check books and the ATM card is also lost along with the vallet. You can’t take any chances when it comes to your wife. They think much better in a crisis than a man. Especially crisis related to gifts.
3. Tell her it is not that you didn’t buy a gift for no rhyme or reason and you can always recite a rhyme to her for the valentines day. (In fact you can recite the reasons in this post as rhymes)
4.You can buy some Amul Chocolates and give them to her; after all, it is a gift for someone you love. From the picture below you can see that these chocolates also convey some message 
5. Tell her you were being followed to the gift shop by Sri Ram Sena and Shiv Sena and hence had to abandon all red ideas and instead turn to brown (chocolates). It is difficult be brave even if you are Shiva or Rama if you are followed by their Sena.
6. If Valentines is all about being red, you can take a print out of your stock portfolio statement and give that to her as a gift “stocks bought for you for “Valentines Day”. (I am sure it will have nothing other than red, unless you are good at lying, in which case, this post will not be of any add on value to you; you can handle the lying part better than using these reasons) You can also see her face turn red which is good for escaping from Valentines Day gift issue.
7. Pick up a old empty carton box from your office (you might have kept it aside to clean your desk in case of pink slip) paste red color paper over it and gift to her with a big smile “to keep all the previous valentines day gifts” in that
8. Open a new blog site with ILOVE”yourlover/wife name”.wordpress.com and copy paste a romantic email forward that you received and say you made your love immortal (be careful to remove the mail id and signature if the mail was from your girlfriend and you are dedicating the blog to your wife). This can be a perpetually working idea if you are lucky enough to get your wife / lover changed between two valentines day.
9. You can buy a pack of heart shaped baloons for less than US $ 1 (about Rs.50) and blow them with her for decorating the house for Valentines day. That will also ensure you have a blast while blowing baloons and after.
10. If you are too broke, you can just buy one baloon give it to her and tell her to blow the baloon saying you want to have her breathe inside that baloon. (That will compensate for anything you didn’t do and any sin you did)
Despite all these ideas, if your wife still gets upset and decides to desert you, don’t be disheartened. There is no better way to achieve reduction in expenses than this. Plus, you get a chance to replace the old model of the wife with a new model wife when things brighten up. If you are lucky, you can even get a “new model” as your wife to shower gifts until next recession hits. At which point you can do a Obama and seek for change.