Galentine’s Day is a national holiday if you ask Leslie Knope. The character, played by Amy Poehler in NBC’s comedy Parks and Recreation, promoted the day before Valentine’s Day holiday with her friends on the show … and it looks like it translated into real life.
The Saturday Night Live alum, 46, spent Tuesday, February 13, with former costars Rashida Jones, Aubrey Plaza and Kathryn Han! “Happy happy Galentine’s day. These women keep me alive,” Plaza, who played April Ludgate, captioned the photo on Instagram. Jones, who portrayed Leslie’s BFF, Ann Perkins, also shared the photo and added the caption, “Galentine’s Day! Forever and ever.”
Poehler’s character introduced the holiday during season 2 of the show. “Every February 13th, my lady friends and I leave our husbands and our boyfriends at home, and we just come and kick it, breakfast-style. Ladies celebrating ladies,” Leslie said on the comedy. “It’s like Lilith Fair, minus the angst. Plus frittatas.”
The show wrapped in February 2015, and producer and writer Mike Schur took the opportunity to explain what Galentine’s Day was.
“What’s wrong with setting aside one day a year to think about a person you love? If you can chip off the layers of irritating cultural and financial strain that have been lacquered on Valentine’s Day in America, what you find, at its core, is a simple request that we all pause for one day, look our husbands and wives and boyfriends and girlfriends in their collective eyes, and tell them they’re swell. That simple truth is what led Leslie Knope to invent Galentine’s Day,” Schur wrote on Pohler’s Smart Girls website the same month the show ended.
“Because if you can set aside a day to celebrate your romantic relationship, you can sure as hell do the same thing for your female friends,” he added. “Parks and Recreation was conceived of as the story of a friendship between two women — Leslie and Ann — very different people who complemented each other perfectly.”
