This year I am more excited about Valentine’s Day than ever before and it’s 100% because it coincides with Ash Wednesday. Ash Wednesday is the first day of Lent in the Western churches – a 40-day fast leading up to Easter. To prepare ourselves for this period of fasting and praying, Christians like to get together on Ash Wednesday and smear ashes on each others’ foreheads, while reflecting on the greatest buzzkill of all: death.

Back to Valentine’s Day. Right now you may be feeling slightly anxious about tonight’s restaurant dinner, enveloping you and your loved one in romantic expectations and frilly decorations. Perhaps coupledom seems like an impossibly big commitment. Fear not! Instead, use this Valentine’s Ash Day to properly contemplate the brevity of life and the ultimate decay of all things present and future. We are alive but for a moment, so get to it. Down that sickly-sweet, pink champagne, kiss your lover, and douse them in poetry.

Here’s some inspiration for your Valentash Wednesday mashup:

For the hardline Protestants
Roses are red
Concrete is gray
If you’re Protestant
you really shouldn’t celebrate today

For the historically inclined Catholics
Violets are blue
Roses are red
St Valentine died
when they cut off his head.

Cassocks are black
or white as a birch
There are 12 St Valentines
in the Catholic church.

Roses are red
and so is my wine
St Valentine was removed from
the General Roman Calendar in 1969.

For the Ash Aficionados
Roses are red
Love and lust burn
Remember you are dust
and to dust you shall return