Today, Valentine’s Day is one of the most commercialized holidays in the world, with bouquets of flowers being sent, heart-shaped boxes of chocolate being given and youth buying cute little cards to exchange with their eager classmates.
In 2013, Americans alone spent $18.6 billion on Valentine’s Day, according to CNN.
However, the holiday did not begin this way. In fact, it dates back to Ancient Rome.
In 496 A.D., Pope Gelasius I named Feb. 14 as Saint Valentine’s Day. The Roman Catholic Church tells two legends of a “Saint Valentine.” In the first legend, Saint Valentine was a priest who continued to perform marriages for lovers in spite of the Emperor’s decree outlawing marriage because he saw that single men were better soldiers than their married counterparts. The second legend has more of a romantic flair. Saint Valentine was a man who helped Christians in harsh Roman prisons and when he himself was jailed for his actions, he fell in love with a young woman and wrote to her from prison, often signing his letters, “From your Valentine.” It is also believed that Saint Valentine was executed on February 14 in 269 A.D.
Before it was a Christianized holiday, the middle of February acted as a pagan fertility celebration. The festival was called Lupercalia and was dedicated to a deity who protected flocks of sheep and other herds from wolves and the she-wolf who raised Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome. The men would sacrifice a goat and a dog, then make strips out of their hides. They would then walk the streets slapping women with the strips. The women gladly obliged since they believed this would make them fertile. The feast would conclude with a type of matchmaking lottery, with single men drawing the names of the single women out of a cup. The name the men selected was their partner for the rest of the festival, and these pairings often resulted in marriage.
Cupid is also a strong symbol of the “Day of Love.” Cupid is the Roman god of love and is a counterpart to Eros in Greek mythology. He is the son of Mercury (Hermes), the winged messenger to the gods and Venus (Aphrodite), the goddess of love. Cupid is often portrayed as a winged baby with a quiver filled with arrows that cause people to fall in love when struck with one.
Even after the pagan traditions surrounding what would be Valentine’s Day disappeared, it still remained as a holiday for romance. In early England and France, it was believed that the birds’ mating season began on Feb. 14. Although Valentine’s greetings were common in the Middle Ages, sending actual Valentines that we know of did not occur until the 1400s. The oldest known Valentine of a sort was written by the Duke of Orleans to his wife in 1415.
Fast forwarding a few hundred years to nineteenth century America, and we have the first mass-produced Valentine’s Day cards from Esther A. Howland, “The Mother of the Valentine.”
Since then, Valentine’s Day has been a day of romance: cards, flowers, candy, giant stuffed teddy bears and the like.
