-Originally published February 14, 2016-
This is just one of the dudes named St. Valentine.
My work compelled me to write a blog post about Valentine’s Day, which our digital team can exploit for their nefarious search engine optimization purposes, or whatever it is they do. And so here is a history of St. Valentine and the day named after him, a laboriously researched and comprehensive treatise full of facts whose verity I can’t actually guarantee. Enjoy!
if you’re among the legions buying lots of lace, chocolate, or floral goods in an effort to show your love (or among the despondent masses for whom this time of year is an annual reminder of their perpetual loneliness), it’s about time for a very special holiday. That’s right, it’s about time for the Roman festival of Lupercalia—or as we less pagan folk like to call it, Valentine’s Day. Impress your (easy impressed) lover this season with a knowledge of valentine-related trivia this year as you learn all about the holiday, its roots, and the weird stuff we’ve grown to celebrate over the millennia.
Who was St. Valentine, and what did he ever do to get a lovers’ holiday named after him? The Catholic Church recognizes at least three different guys named St. Valentine, none of whom were particularly notorious for going around and sticking people with love-inducing arrows. They were all, however, martyred for love-related reasons, which is as good a reason to get martyred as any.
One guy was supposedly an ancient Roman priest. It’s said that Emperor Claudius II decreed that single men were better soldiers than those with families, so he outlawed marriage for young men. Valentine realized the injustice of the new edict and kept marrying young couples in secret. The emperor found out and had him executed. There’s a legend about another of the Valentines, who was imprisoned for helping persecuted Christians. He fell in love with his jailor’s young daughter (whose blindness he had earlier healed, by the way) when she visited him in prison, and he sent her a letter signed, “From your Valentine." People found out and Valentine was put to death. Our modern tradition of exchanging handmade valentines stems from their timeless romance, which we try to forget was probably between some creepy old dude and an underage girl.
The third Valentine was a shadowy figure martyred in Africa with a few unknown companions. We don’t know much about him or his death, but I like to think he spent years holed up in a monastery with his band composing the song “Everything I Do (I Do It For You)” and then was murdered by the time-traveling Canadian singer Bryan Adams, who stole the soon-to-be hit for himself and returned to 1991.
But why February 14? Some people believe the date commemorates the anniversary of one of the Valentines' death or burial around 270 AD. Other say the Catholic Church put St. Valentine’s feast day in the middle of February in an effort to appeal to the pagans, who celebrated the fertility festival of Lupercalia around that time. In said festival, Roman priests gathered at a sacred cave and sacrificed a goat and a dog, flaying them and dipping their hides into sacrificial blood. Then they wandered around gently slapping women with the bloody hides, which was supposed to make the women more fertile but mostly just made them more bloody. Then, according to legend, all the women in the city would place their names in a big urn. A mystical fire would burn in the urn, spitting out the name of one of the women, who would then become the Hogwarts champion and compete in the Triwizard Tournament. No, seriously—then the city’s bachelors would each choose a name and become paired for a year with his chosen women. These matches often ended in marriage. (I call dibs on pitching this idea to ABC as a new reality TV show.)
Lupercalia was outlawed at the end of the 15th century, probably because the anti-hitting-women-with-dead-animals-covered-in-blood movement was starting to gain traction. During the Middle Ages, valentine greetings became popular, because exchanging tokens of love was preferable to dying of plague, which at that time was the chief pastime of medieval people. The oldest known valentine greeting in existence was written in 1415 by Charles, Duke of Orleans, to his wife while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London. Americans probably didn’t start exchanging valentines until the early 1700s. The first mass-produced valentines came in the 1840s, when a woman named Esther Howland (nicknamed the “Mother of the Valentine”) came to the rescue of procrastinating men everywhere and made elaborate lacy constructions they could give to their wives as though they had made the gifts themselves.
Today, the Greeting Card Association estimates that 1 billion Valentine’s Day cards are sent each year, making V-Day second in card-sending only to that most celebrated of holidays, Talk Like a Pirate Day. (No, just kidding. Christmas, naturally, is the festival of consumerism where people send the most cards.) Women buy about 85 percent of all valentines. (Take from that what you will.)
That, ladies and gentleman, is how Valentine’s Day came about, or at least it is according to the first couple of results that came up on Google. Next time you’re sitting alone on February 14, binge-watching Breaking Bad or Gilmore Girls and numbing your despair with perilously saccharine amounts of ice cream, blame St. Valentine. Any of the three will do.
