Andri, once a student at Gadjah Mada University, was driving his motorbike one Valentine's night. The cutest girl alive was on the back seat.
When they stopped at a red light, he moved his left hand over his shoulder while the right continued to hold the handlebar. With a blushing face looking ahead, he expected the girl to accept a flower.
The girl rejected it, joking that it was inappropriate. Baffled, he gripped the flower between his teeth the whole way back to her boardinghouse and upon arrival was forced to strike a pose and finally give the flower.
"I know I should have bought a red rose, but I'm sort of broke right now so anything goes," he confessed, believing that the owner of the boardinghouse where he stayed in his college years wouldn't mind finding one of his precious orchids on the front porch had been cut for love.
"Some people cannot properly express their love," he said, acknowledging that most of the time the fear that the feeling is unrequited, inappropriate or simply foolish prevents people from taking God's ultimate give, to love and to be loved in return. "And this is why Valentine's Day is not just special, but necessary," he added.
But why roses? Andreas Dimas, a friend who went to Sanata Dharma University, said that roses are easy. "Because she's in Yogyakarta now, all I need is to order the roses and have them sent."
Conceding that he's not the romantic type, he admits that the only reason he is doing such a thing is because his girlfriend asked him to. "Well, not exactly. She asked me to write a Valentine's letter. Now I don't know what a Valentine's letter is, but to save me all the trouble, I decided to say it with flowers instead."
As everyone probably already knows, red roses have represented love since the dawn of time. Even the first Charlie Chaplin black and white movies had roses in it - for both funerals and love. Jon Bon Jovi's decision to lay his lover down in a song titled "Bed of Roses", widely heard across the nation after being released in November 1992, was hardly necessary to affirm the rose's popularity.
Especially because Indonesian films staring Rudi Salam and even Dono, Kasino and Indro had elements of the rose in the scenes. One of Rano Karno's films released in 1981, for example, was titled Mawar Cinta Berduri Duka (Rose of Love with Thorns of Pain).
Over the years, more people have bought more roses to express their love on Valentine's Day, although the celebration itself was deemed haram on Feb. 13, 2009 by the Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI) West Java.
Agung Budi Priambodo knows for a fact that flowers express more love on Valentine's Day than any other thing known to man. Starting and currently running www.bungahati.com with his wife, he concedes that the store records a significant leap in orders for Valentine's Day.
"We received around 110 orders in just four days leading up to Valentine's Day last year," he said.
Being a problematic Valentine's Day, as Chinese New Year falls on the same day this year, "We decided to focus our advertisements and sales on Valentine's instead, redesigning our website with Valentine's decorations and offering Valentine's promos."
With chocolate and Teddy Bear bonuses, 10 percent discount and no shipping fee until Feb. 9, BungaHati has received numerous orders even before the peak days of Valentine's, including four orders from international clients in the US and Australia.
"If our target is met for this year's three days before D-day, which is 200 orders, our revenue could reach up to Rp 100 million net, almost twice as much as last year's revenue. That's excluding the rest of the days in the month."
To illustrate, about 13 orders had been placed for the Semi Holland Rose package - the shop's most popular package - by Feb. 5, whereas only five order were received for the same package during the same period last year.
BungaHati offers various packages with prices ranging from Rp 200,000 per package to Rp 480,000. Its biggest Valentine's Day package is a three-day series of rose bouquets, with delivery consisting of 40, 80 and finally 100 red roses sent to an address on Feb. 14 at a price of Rp 3 million.
Apparently, while more people are buying more roses to express their love on Valentine's Day, the rest are buying chocolates.
But how did chocolate candies and bars become an important part of the celebration, if the solid form of chocolate wasn't even invented until 1830 by Joseph Fry & Sons?
There is no solid evidence about how chocolate suddenly got thrown into the celebration except for the fact that Richard Cadbury created the first known heart-shaped candy box for Valentine's Day in 1861, having his son John mass market the first boxes of chocolates in 1868 after introducing chocolate bars in 1849 with Joseph Fry & Sons at an exhibition in Bingley Hall, Birmingham, England.
In Indonesia, one of the very first known chocolate bars for public consumption was Coklat Cap Jago made by PT Ceres in Bandung in the early 1980s.
The chocolate bar, wrapped in predominantly red and white, sold at a ridiculously low price, dominated the lower market for years until better national brands like Silver Queen, Full Cream and international brands like Cadbury, Delfi and Van Houten started to penetrate the market.
There are claims that one of these brands' successful advertisements with a Valentine's setting got people buying chocolate to express their love, as well as the many movies from the West revolving around chocolates on Valentine's Day and Christmas.
Though the number of chocolate buyers in the nation hasn't shown much of an increase over the years, Valentine's Days do peak the record of chocolate sales.
Bayu Amperiawan of www.tokocoklat.com told The Jakarta Post that the number of orders via phone and email always tripled in February.
"The average online bookings can reach 10 inquiries per day during February. Orders are especially quite overwhelming from the 11th day before D-Day," he said.
The store's top products, chocolate hand bouquets, are flower shaped chocolates sold in the form of bouquets. Hard shaped chocolates and boxes of chocolates are the store's second and third top best sellers.
"The number of people ordering directly at the store also increases in February, with most being large-scale orders for chocolates to be sold again for the occasion," he said, adding that he had just shipped a Valentine's order to Kupang, East Nusa Tenggara.
The store recorded an average Rp 15 million in revenue last February, whereas it receives about one-third of that amount in regular months.
But still, when it comes to love, other things can be a perfect gift. After all, there are those who do not eat chocolate for health reasons - that is if they can resist it.
