Why do we celebrate Valentines Day?
February 4, 2023 Leave a comment
It’s easy to tell when February begins; all you have to do is walk into any store. You’ll see lots of red-colored decorations and displays that prominently feature heart shapes. In grocery stores, these displays will sell you candy, flowers, and greeting cards, while other stores will try to convince you that buying that pair of slippers at 30% off is somehow romantic. Also, jewelry stores are going all-out with their ad campaigns on TV about how their most expensive designs “show her that you truly mean it”.
My first encounter with Valentines Day as a child was when my elementary school class did a valentine exchange, where the students gave each other cheap cardboard cards that depicted our favorite cartoon characters saying “Be My Valentine” and boxes of sugary candy hearts. Since we were still little kids who didn’t have any concept yet of romantic or sexual attraction, most of us just gave these cards and candies to our best friends.
Now, as an adult, it seems the 14th day of February is one of the more commercialized holidays on the calendar, alongside the likes of Christmas, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, and Halloween. Businesses big and small push the message that this is a special day to treat your romantic partner with special gifts in celebration of your relationship. All of this begs the question – how did such a tradition come about? Why do we have a holiday that’s all about romance? Why do we celebrate this holiday in wintertime? Also, where in the world did a term like “Valentine” come from?
It turns out that the story of Valentines Day is one that we see again and again when we look at the origin stories of the most popular holidays on the calendar. Say it with me now: an ancient Roman pagan holiday that was Christianized in the 5th century.
Phase 1: the ancient Roman pagan holiday
Lupercalia was one of Rome’s most ancient holidays, celebrating the popular myth that the city’s founders, Romulus and Remus, were raised by a wolf mother. Every February 15th, two of Rome’s oldest hereditary clans who claimed descent from the city’s two founders would gather at the cave where the mythical she-wolf raised them. The clans would then ritually sacrifice some goats and a dog. One young man from each clan would step forward to the sacrificial altar, where the priest who just completed the animal sacrifices would wipe the blood off the knife onto the foreheads of the two men. The two men would then laugh, symbolically absolving their clans’ ancestors (since, according to Rome’s founding myth, Romulus had murdered Remus).
If that all sounds strange to you, believe me, it gets much, much stranger.
After this ritual was complete, the men in these two clans would fashion whips from the sacrificed animals’ hides, strip naked, and publicly run through Rome’s streets whipping the women they encountered. Believe it or not, the ancient Roman women wanted to be whipped, and would run out in front of these naked men to try to provoke a lashing. The reason was that it was believed that those women who were whipped would become fertile. After this bizarre parade, the names of all of Rome’s single ladies would be placed in a big urn for Rome’s bachelors to draw names from, in an ancient equivalent of arranging a blind date.
If all of this sounds unsettling to you, just imagine what the early Christian missionaries who came to Rome thought about all of this. After the emperor Constantine began the empire’s conversion to Christianity, the holiday was eventually banned.
Having said that, during this transitional period where the Roman state and early Christian church became intertwined, it was very common for the various pagan Roman holidays to be replaced with Christian ones in order to ease the religious conversion process for the average Roman citizen. Thus, Pope Gelasius declared February 14th to be Saint Valentine’s Day.
Phase 2: the Christianized holiday
So, who was Saint Valentine? Well, the truth is, we don’t really know. My sources agreed that there were multiple people named “Valentine” (or, more likely, Valentinus) who were meant to be honored on February 14th, but they couldn’t even agree on whether there were two or three of them.
That never stopped medieval Christians from devising legends surrounding “St. Valentine”, who was considered the patron saint of love and marriage. According to these legends, St. Valentine was an early Christian bishop serving in Italy who was placed under house arrest by the Roman authorities for refusing to worship the Roman gods. The judge who had sentenced Valentine happened to have a blind daughter. When Valentine miraculously cured her blindness, the judge went home, destroyed all his idols, and came back to be baptized as a new Christian.
Later, the Roman emperor Claudius II issued a decree that only single men could serve in the Roman army. Well, many early Christians were pacifists who believed war was a violation of the commandment “Thou shalt not kill”. Thus, to get out of serving in the Roman army, young Christian men would secretly bring their girlfriends with them to meet Valentine so he could marry them. This so offended the emperor that he had Valentine beheaded.
This legend, combined with the common medieval belief that the mating season for bids started in mid-February, helped to cement the association in many medieval minds between St. Valentine’s Day and romance. Both Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare wrote poems about the holiday as a day to celebrate romantic love. Meanwhile, the oldest valentine (as in, a romantic note written to be delivered during the holiday) that we have was written in 1415. Duke Charles of Orleans wrote it to his wife while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London; today, it is preserved in the British Library.
Phase 3: The commercialized holiday
The practice of sending valentines may date back at least as far back as the 15th century, but it was during the Industrial Revolution that modern valentine cards came to exist. In the mid-19th century, an American woman named Esther Howland created the first mass-produced valentine cards for young men to send to their girlfriends on St. Valentine’s Day. Her cards were so popular that soon, other competitors began making their own versions.
In 1913, the Hallmark greeting card company began making their own mass-produced valentine cards, cementing the sending of such valentines as a staple of the holiday. By this time, the holiday had already started transforming into the commercialized festival we celebrate today.
It was the Victorian-era British chocolatier Richard Cadbury who invented the heart-shaped chocolate box as a way to festively make some money off of his excess stock.
It was also around this same time that the Victorians developed a cultural concept of a “flower language” where you would give someone a flower to communicate some sort of message, with each flower meaning something different. Since red roses were the flower of love and romance, Victorian men sent their wives and fiancées roses on St. Valentine’s Day, and though the rest of the Victorian “flower language” has long since fallen by the wayside, this one aspect of the practice has survived.
Of course, if the advertisements we see every February are to be believed, the biggest way to show that you love someone is to give that person a diamond ring, necklace, or earring. After all, they say “diamonds are forever”, right? Nothing else encapsulates just how you hope your love for each other will last into eternity! This association of diamonds with a lifetime romantic commitment is an ancient one – if, by ancient, you mean the 1930’s, when diamond mining firm DeBeers partnered with the New York-based ad agency N.W. Ayer & Son to promote this connection in people’s minds. The advertisers convinced American newspapers to run fluff pieces about how romantic of a gemstone a diamond is, and made sure some of the most famous Hollywood celebrities of the day wore diamonds in public. In the late 1940’s, Frances Gerety coined the advertising slogan “A Diamond Is Forever”, and this was shrewdly used to convince American men that giving their girlfriends a diamond engagement ring was a requirement when asking her to be your wife.
I think it’s really telling that these days, most people don’t call the holiday “Saint Valentine’s Day”. It’s just “Valentines Day” – a secular holiday to celebrate romantic relationships, with the religious connotations largely purged by big business. Then again, the holiday we celebrate today is so far removed from the ancient Roman celebration that started this whole journey, it makes me wonder how future generations will change the meaning of the holiday to suit their times.
However you celebrate it, I hope you all have a very Happy Valentines Day!