The first thing I knew about when I joined Keystone was Valentine’s Day. Even though February was a distant concept at the beginning of the year, my classmates excitedly detailed exactly what would happen on Valentine’s Day––older kids would come into class and greet the class with bags full of chocolates, candy, and stuffed animals. We, the younger kids, would expectantly wait for our names to be called–if at all–in hopes that our friends or classmates had purchased something for us. As years passed, even I became inclined towards the tradition, anticipating what new items would be sold and, perhaps even more so, the cringy Valentine’s-themed names the juniors would come up with each year. A part of me looked forward to finally being that junior interrupting class on Valentine’s Day to deliver bags full of chocolate and stuffed animals and a part dreaded it. Yet here I am, eight miles of walking, countless hours of dealing with absurd calculation errors, and a very thorough spreadsheet later.

After another, debatably, successful Keystone School Valentine’s Day, we are left to ruminate over its persisting legacy–that which has propelled Keystone juniors to organize a schoolwide fundraiser for countless years. It’s a tradition I don’t comprehend, even having participated in the celebrations for many years. I would say it’s an established cycle more than a culture, comparable to the food chain, although less fundamental and more festive. I say that because it all felt surreal–after eight years of enjoying the benefits of multiple junior classes’ tireless efforts and being told by teachers that one day it would be us in their shoes, it was finally the Class of 2026’s turn. It is cyclic in that it marks a passage of time, a checkpoint from which we can look back from and see just how close we are to the future. It’s a completely unoriginal experience, one which each subsequent class will come to face and many previous ones have already reckoned with.

Enough about all of that, though. You’re probably here to hear about all the behind-the-scenes details. I have to credit most of the planning to Faith, our class president. She organized which items we would sell, worked to buy and store the items, worked with our class sponsors to coordinate class efforts, and consistently stayed on top of what we needed to get done even months before February. As a whole, our class cooperatively worked as one to get things done. Hundreds of packets were made when they were needed, and purchased items were tagged and organized as required. While most of the class was working on processing purchased items, I had my fair share of work in Nurse Penny’s office, checking orders. I saw the most absurd variety of erroneous arithmetic, from middle schoolers doing multiplication by hand and missing the total cost by eons to mismatching forms and tags. Safe to say, I was thoroughly saturated by the end of each day, given that schoolwork didn’t lax at all in the weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day either.

I’ve been sort of cynical up to this point, so I guess you’re wondering what the purpose of this article is–the moral, or perhaps a truth pithily stated that you can take away from this experience. I’m not a profound thinker, so I can’t leave you with much, but I will say that the aggregated benefits of this grueling process far outweighed any hesitations I had going into this project. Being able to experience our class’s months of preparation come to fruition on Valentine’s Day as juniors scurried across campus to deliver Valentine’s-themed goods and see the finally empty the storage room at the end of the day left me full of gratefulness for the community I’ve entered. It’s something I’ve seen only occur at such depth and wholeness at Keystone, and I hope it persists.