I. LOVE. VALENTINE’S. DAY. Yes. I love it. I love most holidays though, so I’m not sure what that means….

For all you Valentine’s haters out there, who think the holiday was created by card and candy companies, here is a brief history of the holiday (which I found on various websites so who really knows how much of it is true ).

- The holiday is named after Saint Valentine (duh), but there were multiple Valentines back in the day. It seems that they were all early Christian martyrs. Valentine of Rome was a priest in Rome (surprise!), martyred around 269 AD (and buried in Via Flaminia on February 14). Valentine of Terni was a bishop, martyred sometime between 214 and 275 AD. There was a third Valentine, but nobody knows much about that guy, other than he is said to have been martyred in Africa on February 14th.

- In ancient Rome, February was the official beginning of spring and brought Lupercalia, a pagan fertility festival dedicated to the Roman god of agriculture Faunus (as well as Roman founders Romulus and Remus), which began at the ideas of February (February 15). Some believe the Christian church decided to celebrate Valentine’s feast day in the middle of February in efforts to “Christianize” Lupercalia.

- Pope Gelasius dubbed February 14th “Saint Valentine’s Day” in 498 AD. There were no romanical ties at the time. (Side note: In 1969, Pope Paul VI took it of the Roman Catholic Calendar of Saints.)

- Valentine’s Day’s association with romantic love started with and his pals in the High Middle Ages, when “courtly love” was all the rage. The first mention of the day was in Parlement of Foules (1382) by Geoff himself! The lines read something like this: “For this was Saint Valentine’s Day, when every bird cometh there to choose his mate.” (except in some way-too-hard-to-understand old English). The poem was written for two young lovebirds (well, more likely two kids paired by their royal families), who got hitched while they were both 15 years old.

- There’s some more stuff about Courtly Love and poetry…and stuff.

- The whole “Roses are red, violets are blue” bit comes from a collection of English nursery rhymes Gammer Gurton’s Garland from 1784. Here it is:

The rose is red, the violet’s blue
The honey’s sweet, and so are you
Thou are my love and I am thine
I drew thee to my Valentine
The lot was cast and then I drew
And Fortune said it shou’d be you.

Though, an earlier version can be found in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene from 1590:

She bath’d with roses red, and violets blew,
And all the sweetest flowres, that in the forrest grew.

- Come 1797, English publishers came out with pre-written verses for dudes that couldn’t quite come up with their own. They also produced limited numbers of Valentine cards.

- The world saw a “Valentine Reinvention” in the 1840s when Leigh Eric Schmidt, a writer in Grahm’s American Monthly, stated “Saint Valentine’s Day…is becoming, nay it has become, a national holyday.”

- The first mass-produced valentines (made up of embossed paper lace) were produced and sold around 1847 by Esther Howland (aka the Mother of the Valentine). She had seen an English valentine one of her father’s business associates had sent him and started importing paper lace and floral decorations from England.

Side Note: Hallmark was founded in 1910. Russell Stover was started in 1923. Just a *few* years after any of the Valentines lived or died and Chaucer scribbled his works….just sayin’. Stands to reason that they did NOT in fact invent the holiday…rather they just took advantage of a sweet money-making opportunity. Yeah?

- Only since the 1980s has the diamond industry been promoting jewelry as a Valentine’s Day gift (Pfft, they would… That’s far less sad then a “Push Present”, though…when you give birth, isn’t a BABY gift enough?!?!)

- The U.S. Greeting Card Association estimates that approx 190 million valentines are sent each year (half being cards given to non-spouse family members like kiddos). If you count the valentines given in grade school classrooms (and this year, the office that I work in), the number goes up to 1 billion. Isn’t that crazy?!

There are so many more things to write about, but since this post has already gone way past “brief”, I’ll end it here. If you’re at all interested, I got most of this information here and here. And, you can find some more fun facts here. Yay yay yay for Valentine’s Day!

Sources: Vintage Valentine | Saint Valentine | Romulus and Remus | Geoff Chaucer | The Faerie Queene | Esther Howland

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