Valentine’s Day
Valentine’s Day today is a sweet day of pinks and purples, boxes of chocolate, and bouquets. School children craft cute boxes to collect valentines from classmates, while adults plan romantic dinners and exchange sentimental gifts with our one and only. But the holiday’s history is a bit more complicated.
The holiday is aptly named after Saint Valentine. According to a late medieval legend, Valentine is based on a Roman priest named Father Valentinus who was executed on February 14 by Roman Emperor Gothicus in the 3rd century.
Father Valentinus was arrested during the reign of Emperor Gothicus and put into the custody of an aristocrat named Asterius. As the story goes, Asterius made the mistake of letting the preacher talk. Father Valentinus went on and on about Christ leading pagans out of the shadow of darkness and into the light of truth and salvation. Asterius made a bargain with Valentinus: If the Christian could cure Asterius’s foster daughter of blindness, he would convert. Valentinus put his hands over the girl’s eyes and chanted: “Lord Jesus Christ, enlighten your handmaid, because you are God, the True Light.” According to the legend, as easy as that, the child could see. Asterius and his whole family were baptized. Unfortunately, when Emperor Gothicus heard the news, he ordered them all to be executed. But Valentinus was the only one to be beheaded.
If you’re thinking that none of this sounds very lovey-dovey, that’s because Valentine’s Day did not begin to resemble the romantic holiday we know today until the Middle Ages, and we might have the poet Geoffrey Chaucer to thank. Chaucer was the first to link love with St. Valentine in his 14th century works “The Parliament of Fowls” (a poem with 100 stanzas) and “The Complaint of Mars” (a six page writing called a poem). Therefore, Chaucer is credited with inventing Valentine’s Day as we know it today.
At the time of Chaucer’s writings, February 14 also happened to be considered the first day of spring in Britain, because it was the beginning of the mating season for birds; perfectly appropriate for a celebration of affection. In fact, Chaucer’s “The Parliament of Fowls” is all about birds gathering to choose their mates. A line from the poem states, “For this was on Saint Valentine’s Day, when every fowl comes there his mate to take”.
Whether or not Chaucer can be fully credited, it is true that he and fellow writer Shakespeare popularized the amorous associations surrounding the day. The word “love” in one form or another appears 2,338 times in Shakespeare’s collected works. Soon, people began penning and exchanging love letters to celebrate Valentine’s Day.
The mid-19th century marked the beginning of many of the commercialized Valentine’s Day traditions we know today. Victorian men wooed women with flowers, Richard Cadbury created the first heart-shaped box of chocolates, and the New England Confectionery Company, or Necco, began stamping out an early version of Conversation Hearts. Also around this time, the “Mother of the American Valentine” Esther Howland, only in her early 20s, popularized store-bought English-style valentines in America thanks to her innovative assembly line process that made the elaborate cards affordable. By the early 1910s, an American company that would one day become Hallmark began distributing its more official “Valentine’s Day cards.”
The rest, of course, is history. So, no matter how you celebrate Valentine’s Day, it is good to remember the one that is nearest to your heart, and let him/her know that they are loved, not only that day, but every day.
