Valentine's day indicate a season of love and people have been urged to show affection and care for their neighbours.
Valentine’s Day is a time to celebrate
romance and love and kissy-face fealty. But the origins of this festival of
candy and cupids are actually dark, bloody — and a bit muddled.
Though no one has pinpointed the exact
origin of the holiday, one good place to start is ancient Rome, where men hit
on women by, well, hitting them.
From February 13 to 15, the Romans
celebrated the feast of Lupercalia. The men sacrificed a goat and a dog, then
whipped women with the hides of the animals they had just slain.
The Roman romantics “were drunk. They
were naked,” says Noel Lenski, a historian at the University of Colorado at
Boulder. Young women would actually line up for the men to hit them, Lenski
says.
They believed this would make them
fertile.
The brutal fete included a matchmaking
lottery, in which young men drew the names of women from a jar. The couple
would then be, um, coupled up for the duration of the festival — or longer, if
the match was right.
The ancient Romans may also be
responsible for the name of our modern day of love. Emperor Claudius II
executed two men — both named Valentine — on February 14 of different years in
the 3rd century A.D. Their martyrdom was honored by the Catholic Church with
the celebration of St. Valentine’s Day.
Later, Pope Gelasius I muddled things in
the Fifth Century by combining St. Valentine’s Day with Lupercalia to expel the
pagan rituals. But the festival was more of a theatrical interpretation of what
it had once been.
Lenski adds, “It was a little more of a
drunken revel, but the Christians put clothes back on it. That didn’t stop it
from being a day of fertility and love.”
Around the same time, the Normans
celebrated Galatin’s Day. Galatin meant “lover of women.” That was likely
confused with St. Valentine’s Day at some point, in part because they sound
alike.
As the years went on, the holiday grew
sweeter. Chaucer and Shakespeare romanticized it in their work, and it gained
popularity throughout Britain and the rest of Europe. Handmade paper cards
became the tokens-du-jour in the Middle Ages.
Eventually, the tradition made its way
to the New World. The industrial revolution ushered in factory-made cards in
the 19th century.
And in 1913, Hallmark Cards of Kansas
City, Missouri, began mass producing valentines. February has not been the same
since.
Today, the holiday is big business:
According to market research firm IBIS World, Valentine’s Day sales reached
$17.6bn last year; this year’s sales are expected to total $18.6bn.
But that commercialization has spoiled
the day for many. Helen Fisher, a sociologist at Rutgers University, says we
have only ourselves to blame.
“This isn’t a command performance,” she
says. “If people didn’t want to buy Hallmark cards, they would not be bought,
and Hallmark would go out of business.”
And so the celebration of Valentine’s
Day goes on, in varied ways. Many will break the bank buying jewelry and
flowers for their beloveds.
Others will celebrate in a SAD (that’s
Single Awareness Day) way, dining alone and bingeing on self-gifted chocolates.
A few may even be spending this day the
same way the early Romans did. But let’s not go there.
(National Public Radio)
When News Breaks Out, We Break In. (The 2014 Bloggies Finalist)
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