Valentine’s Day

Valentine’s Day is a yearly occasion that Lara Jean Song Covey treats as a deliberate exercise in romance: affection should be made by hand, placed where it can be discovered, and marked with objects that carry meaning. In the holiday episode, her labor over cards and pastries turns the day into a private courtship ritual with Peter Kavinsky. Yet the celebration is not secure simply because its symbols are sweet. Peter’s continuing closeness with Genevieve unsettles Lara Jean, and the gifts exchanged between the couple carry the story’s uncertainty as well as its tenderness.

Courtship and the Old-Fashioned Ideal

Valentine’s Day belongs to a broader pattern in Lara Jean’s thinking about dating. At the movies, standing with Peter in the popcorn line, she preserves her ticket stub because she wants a keepsake from what she calls her first date. Peter points out that they have gone out before, but the distinction matters to her: this ordinary outing feels newly legible as a date, and therefore worth saving. The stub turns an everyday activity into a record of a romantic milestone.

Her wish to give romance a recognizable form surfaces again during homework with Peter at Starbucks. Lara Jean imagines dating as it might have worked in the 1950s: one person could take someone to a drive-in, another could invite them to a dance, and courtship would proceed through dates rather than immediately assigning a serious relationship. She connects that ideal to the custom of wearing a pin to signify that someone was a person’s girl. Her interest is not a request to date other people; Peter’s question makes her clarify that she is considering a style of courtship, not proposing a change to their relationship.

Lara Jean calls the old-fashioned approach postfeminist and finds something sweet in its relative lightness. Her reasoning also comes from caution. Margot Song Covey has told her that she wishes she had not let her relationship with Josh become so heavy, while Peter has said he disliked how serious things became with Genevieve. Lara Jean wants a breakup, if one ever happens, not to make it impossible for former partners to share a room or remain friends. Valentine’s Day’s traditional forms—dates, cards, and tokens—fit her hope that romance can be acknowledged without making every feeling irrevocable.

Handmade Gifts and Family Ritual

Lara Jean approaches the holiday as a maker. She has kept materials from scrapbooking and gathered lace, ribbon, doilies, beads, pearls, rhinestones, and old-fashioned rubber stamps depicting Cupid, hearts, and flowers. These supplies allow her to build a valentine from accumulated, carefully saved pieces. The handmade quality is central to her idea of the occasion: a card should feel modest, sincere, and personal rather than merely purchased.

The family’s exchange gives this romantic practice a wider setting. Daddy traditionally receives one valentine from Lara Jean, Kitty Covey, and Margot; this year Margot is sending him one of her own for the first time. Josh is also included, although Kitty takes the lead on his card and Lara Jean adds her name beneath Kitty’s. The holiday therefore registers changes in the sisters’ lives as well as their affection: Margot’s independent card marks a new stage in the family’s small tradition, while the card for Josh reflects Kitty and Lara Jean’s shared gesture.

Peter’s card is more specifically a declaration between the two of them. Lara Jean makes it as a white heart edged with white lace, stitching a teasing possessive message to Peter in pink thread. She had considered a more elaborate, beaded design, but Kitty advises that it would be too much. The finished card is playful rather than grand, yet it explicitly acknowledges that Peter and Lara Jean are in a relationship. Its balance of teasing and commitment mirrors Lara Jean’s larger preference for romance that is earnest without becoming oppressive.

The School-Day Reversal and Peter’s Gifts

The night before Valentine’s Day, Lara Jean decides that the card needs a companion and gets up before sunrise to bake cherry turnovers. The effort leaves cherry juice across the kitchen surfaces; it recalls an earlier red velvet cake mishap that required her to clean coloring from the backsplash grout with a toothbrush. The pastries turn out as she hoped, and she plans to share them at lunch with Peter and friends, including Lucas and Chris if Chris comes to school. She also leaves two turnovers for Daddy.

Lara Jean texts Peter that she does not need a ride because she wants to arrive early and put his valentine in his locker. To her, the locker resembles a mailbox: leaving a letter for someone has more romance than handing it over directly. The gesture is carefully staged, but the scene she encounters at school unsettles the plan’s meaning. Peter is already by the vending machines with Genevieve, his hands on her shoulders as he speaks intently to her. Genevieve appears downcast. Lara Jean wonders whether Peter is simply comforting his ex-girlfriend or whether their closeness means something more, and whether she herself is being paranoid. On the day intended to affirm her place as Peter’s girlfriend, she feels as if she has interrupted a moment between him and his former partner.

Peter’s own gifts make the day more complicated than that first glimpse suggests. He gives Lara Jean a poem, making a private, personal offering that answers her crafted card with words. He also gives her the heart locket she had admired for months at his mother’s antique store. At Christmas, Daddy had told her the necklace was sold, and Lara Jean believed it had disappeared from her life for good. Finding it again, now chosen by Peter for her, makes the locket a gift with a history: it joins an earlier desire, a mistaken sense of loss, and Peter’s knowledge of what mattered to her. When he fastens it around her neck, the holiday’s romantic symbols become material and intimate rather than merely decorative.

The Holiday’s Fragile Promise

The Valentine’s episode sets intention against uncertainty. Lara Jean arranges the day through handmade objects and planned gestures, but she cannot control what Peter’s attentiveness to Genevieve means. His poem and the recovered locket reassure her through specific acts of thoughtfulness, without erasing the tension that prompted her questions. The date is thus not a simple resolution; it makes visible how much she wants recognizable signs of commitment and how vulnerable she feels when those signs compete with Peter’s lingering connection to his ex-girlfriend.

A later encounter sharpens that vulnerability by contrasting Valentine’s romance with a different scene of courtship. After dancing with John Ambrose McClaren at a nursing-home USO party, Lara Jean sees Peter arriving with Genevieve, her arm linked through his. The sight makes the intervening year seem to vanish in Lara Jean’s perception, as if her relationship with Peter had never happened. This later moment is not part of Valentine’s Day, but it echoes the holiday’s central problem: a token, a dance, or an affectionate gesture can feel like proof of belonging, while the presence of an old attachment can suddenly make that belonging seem uncertain. Valentine’s Day gathers Lara Jean’s hopes into handmade forms; the story’s later reversals show why those forms matter to her, and why they cannot guarantee what she most wants them to guarantee.