The History of Valentines Day
St. Valentines Day is known around the world as a day for lovers. We buy valentine gifts, write love poems, & generally express our affection for our significant others. When you look at the greeting card aisle, with all the innocuous pink hearts & red paper, & you see the chocolate candies & red roses, it is difficult to imagine that this holiday has its roots in a bloody festival & a violent murder. However that is indeed the case of St. Valentine Day.
Actually, two modern holidays, Mardi Gras
& St. Valentine Day, have their roots in the same ancient festival
originally celebrated by the Romans. Valentine Day began as the Lupercalia, a
festival celebrated on February 15. The festival involved sacrifices &
striking women with bloody pieces of animal skin (a tradition that is honored
when people throw beads at women during the Mardi Gras parade), but it was also
the one day of the year when teenage boys & girls were allowed to mingle
with each other. The night before the festival, the names of all the girls were
written on pieces of paper. The papers were then placed in a jar & a boy
would randomly select the name of a girl. Those two were allowed to hang-out
together during the festival & throughout the entire year. As anyone can
well imagine many of the young couples fell & love & would marry each
other over the next year.
That is not all there is to the history of St. Valentine Day, however. History tells us that St. Valentine was a real person. Valentine lived in the Roman Empire under Emperor Claudius II. Claudius II was known for getting his empire involved in bloody & unpopular campaigns. As a result, he had difficulty maintaining the number of people in his army. Claudius II believed that part of the reason why young men did not want to join the army is because they did not wish to leave their new wives at home & risk not coming home. He came up with a plan to get more men to join the military. He cancelled all engagements & would not allow anyone in the empire to get married, he thought if young men could not get married that they would be more likely to join the army & fight his unpopular wars. Valentine, along with another priest, Marius (St. Marius), thought this was wrong & they continued to marry people in secret. Both men were eventually found out & were sentenced to death. Valentine was killed on February 14, in about 270 A.D. As an aside, it is a legend that Valentine left a farewell note to his jailer’s daughter, whom he had become friends with, & signed it, ‘From your Valentine.
Over the course of the next few hundred years, as Christianity became more & more dominant & the Roman Empire fell, Christians co-opted the holidays of the Romans & made them their own. The day for lovers & fertility became the February 14, the day that Valentine died, instead of the traditional day of the Lupercalia, February 15. The sacrifices ended, but people continued to express affection for each other. Young boys & girls were no longer matched up via pieces of paper, but it is still a day for young people to send secret valentines & to people they would otherwise be too shy to approach. For adults in countries that celebrate the holiday, more people become engaged on St. Valentine Day than on any other single day of the year. Although the history of Valentine day is bloody, these days it is all about love.
