Season 3: Episode 63: House of Cards
Christine tells Jimmy not to buy a Valentine's Day gift for her this year, as she's come to the realization that the holiday is just a cheap ploy to get poor schmucks to spend their hard-earned money. Jimmy's glad that they're not exchanging gifts -- until Christine surprises him with a card the day before. Since he assumed a card was a gift, he stalls and gets her to agree to hang onto it until tomorrow, so they can swap on Valentine's Day. He then drags Greg out to the mall to buy one, but it's so last-minute that all the good cards are gone. Desperate, he enlists Greg's aid in tearing down the shop's huge display model, racking up $384 in ceiling damages in the process, and anticipates winning Christine's heart with his life-size card. But the only thing he wins is her wrath after she opens it and sees nothing more than "Love, Jimmy," as opposed to the long, thoughtful message she wrote in her own. Jimmy sulks while going through her old cards to him, until Greg points out to him that Christine wrote the same exact message in every one. Expecting an apology, Jimmy tries to throw the Xeroxed cards in her face and gloat, but an unapologetic Christine yells at him for failing to notice it until now. Worried that her plagiarism and his writing less and less every year means the love's gone out of the marriage, Christine hands Jimmy a pen and paper, and makes him write out what he feels for her, while she does the same. When they both jot down the lyrics to Bon Jovi's Living on a Prayer, they realize everything's fine.