Living with Olivia: Living Every Day Like It's Galentine's Day

Valentine’s Day might not be your jam, but I feel like we can all agree that Galentine’s Day is something to look forward to. It’s a time to formally appreciate the one’s your heart first and foremost belongs to- your gal pals. I participated in two Galentine’s celebration’s this year. The first came with a little more planning, the second was a spur of the moment gathering, but both were filled with so much love.

I celebrated my first Galentine’s Day on the 8th with the group I refer to as my “Orange County Friends.” So me and Emo met in college. She was my sorority big sister, so we’ve been best friends since my freshman year of college. Over the years, I’ve thrown myself into her childhood friend group, and we’ve all become best friends (you’ll learn very quickly with me that basically everyone is my best friend… the episode of As Told By Ginger where they talked about having more than one best friend truly shaped me.) So since Emo and her friends are from the OC, I call that my Orange County friend group when explaining who I am hanging out with to my mom. So Emo hosted the party, her only requests were to dress in our cutest pinks and reds, bring our favorite pizza toppings, and to bring Valentine’s if we’d like. I literally hadn’t shopped for Valentine’s since… High School? It was so much fun and so cute. It made me want to go back to school and make the little mailboxes and give like the cute big card to the boy I was crushing out. Like I think that was the biggest thrill when you were little. I also brought some goodie bags with bubble bars and bath bombs from LUSH. Literally, I will find any excuse to free myself of all the free LUSH stuff I’ve acquired. (Speaking of which, if you haven’t subscribed yet, click here to be entered to win a grab bag of LUSH goods)

So I brought wine, white sauce, and pineapple, and basil for the ‘za. The rest of the girls brought great toppings too, a great variety. It was a fun idea for people to bring some of their favorite toppings so that we would be introduced to interesting combinations. Emo had the dough ready for us. We worked in pairs and created three pizzas. But while those were baking we got to catch up and talk, which is literally my favorite hobby. It was nice because one of our friends is getting married so we got to hear some fun planning details. But we also had a friend dealing with some tough news. You could tell that we all really appreciated the timing of this get together. There was laughing, crying, laughing till we were crying, literally. It was no different than any other get together, other than the fact we had to wear cute pink dresses… which immediately after taking pictures I changed out of and into sweatpants. So literally it was no different than any get together, but I was nice to take the time out of our schedules just to be with each other.

My second Galentine’s Day was a little belated, we celebrated on the 15th, and made the plans the day of… ish. So my other friend group is Kelly and Ayris and we all met when we worked as orientation leaders in college and we really don’t remember how we became best friends, it just happened. I refer to them by our group chat name, “Fake Friends.” We just have the weirdest dynamic. We are brutally honest- we will tell you flat out, “No I don’t want to hang out with you” or “change, you don’t look good in that” without any cushioning. Anyway, Kelly is crazy (yeah, bish, I know you’re reading this). But she truly is an odd one and aggressively avoids celebrating her birthday. We literally didn’t know when her birthday was for the longest time… like we knew it was in February but it wasn’t until the past two years she let us plan something for her… but it still was like pulling teeth… This year she flat out refused to let us take her out and celebrate her. It’s probably because me any Ayris made her cry on her birthday last year before going to a Soul Cycle class… I don’t know if it’s just me and my personality but it’s so hard for me to let something like celebrating a birthday go… like I feel like unsatisfied and that I didn’t do my duty as a friend. So Ayris hit us up on Tuesday the 12th asking if we wanted to do a belated Galentine’s on Friday. We all agreed. I was ampped, I hadn’t seen them since NYE. Plus I knew we could also turn this into an informal bday celebration for Kelly. We didn’t really have a solid game plan, different spots in LA were thrown around. But once Friday rolled around, it was so rainy and cold that going to LA seemed miserable. I am 100% a homebody, I am my happiest self when I spend a night wearing PJ’s and talking. So I took a risk and Friday afternoon suggested we stay in. Kelly offered to host. We all agreed that sounded like fun. I talked to Kells on the phone and we tried to plan what we were gonna eat, I told her I’d bring wine and stuff for chocolate strawberries. I actually ended up getting stuff for chocolate fondue- Ayris loves pound cake so I knew that she’d probably appreciate that after driving from Woodland Hills to Covina.

After shopping I went to Kelly’s and she was in the process of decorating our table with cute plates and string lights, and flowers. It was like, who is this girl she didn’t need to plan to be cute? We went shopping for charcuterie and we got sliders. Like wutta spread. Ayris arrived like right after we got home. Everything was timed perfectly. Kelly’s parents are so cute and funny and her mom gave us red envelopes to celebrate Chinese New Year. I honestly wasn’t knowledgeable about the red envelope customs so I learned about the practice. I guess the symbol of the envelope is basically your fortune for the year- mine said “to bring/arrive.” I told Kelly’s Mom that this envelope is going to bring me my new job. But I laughed so hard that night, Kelly told us the most embarrassing story that I might share one day. I also forced a Birthday gift upon Kelly- she accepted it because I called it a “just for living gift.” I even though this party was more spur of the moment, we had the same appreciation for actually going out of our way to make it work. It didn’t matter what we were wearing or eating, we were able to take the time and join together and share our lives for a couple hours.