We give a cononical sythetic construction of the mirror family to pairs (Y,D) where Y is a smooth projective surface and D is an anti-canonical cycle of rational curves. This mirror family is constructed as the spectrum of an explicit algebra structure on a vector space with canonical basis and multiplication rule defined in terms of counts of rational curves on Y meeting D in a single point. The elements of the canonical basis are called theta functions. Their construction depends crucially on the Gromov-Witten theory of the pair (Y,D)