On February 14, Valentines Day we shower the special people in our lives with tokens of our affection; cards, flowers and sweet confections, but what are the origins of this sweetest of holidays? Valentines Day as we celebrate it today, has its roots in both Christian and Roman traditions.
Today, the Catholic Church recognizes at least three different saints named Valentine or Valentinus, all of whom were martyred Some believe Valentine's Day was originally celebrated on February 14th to commemorate the death of one or all of these saints. However, Valentine's Day was also an attempt by the church to Christianize the Roman festival of Lupercalia.
In ancient Rome, early spring was a time for cleansing and purification. Houses were ritually swept out and salt and spelt were sprinkled throughout the rooms to purify them. The festival of Lupercalia, which was first celebrated around the 3rd century, began on February 15th (the ides of February). Lupercalia honored Lupercus, the Roman god who protected shepherds and flocks from ravaging wolves, and also honored the founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus On this day, Roman priests of the order of Luperci would gather at the mouth of the sacred cave where Romulus and Remus were believed to have been nurtured by a she-wolf (or Lupa), and sacrifice a number of goats for fertility and dogs for purification. The goat hide would be sliced into strips and dipped into the sacrificial blood. Following a ritual feast, male youths adorned with goat skins would run around the community, slapping the crop fields and also women with the strips to guarantee fertility in the coming year. At the end of the day, all the unmarried women of the village would place their names in a big urn, and the unmarried men would each draw out a name from the urn. The two would then be paired for the year (which began in March) and these matches often ended in matrimony.
Around 498 A.D., Pope Gelasius declared February 14 "St. Valentine's Day" and abolished the Roman lottery system for romantic pairing, declaring it un-Christian. Instead, he decreed that priests substitute the drawing of saints names for the names of the girls. The priests would place the saints' names into an urn or box. The young people then drew a name from the container, and in the following year, the youth was supposed to emulate the life of the saint whose name he had drawn. During the middle ages it was commonly believed that February 14 was the day of mating for birds,. The tradition of birds choosing their mates on St. Valentine's Day led to the idea that boys and girls would do the same. The tradition of drawing names reverted back to girls' names again, but now when a youth drew a girl's name, he wore it on his sleeve, and attended and protected her during the following year. This made the girl his Valentine and they exchanged love tokens throughout the year and notes signed with "In St. Valentine's Love".
Valentines Day greetings were known as far back as the middle ages and written greetings first began to appear around 1400 in Great Britain. Legend has it that Charles, Duke of Orleans, sent the first real Valentine card to his wife in 1415, when he was imprisoned in the Tower of London. Valentine's Day began to be popularly celebrated around the 17th century and by the middle of the 18th century it was common for friends and lovers to exchange small gifts or handwritten notes. By the end of the 18th century, printed Valentine's Day began to replace the handwritten notes due to improvements in printing technology. Ready made cards were a convenient and acceptable way for people to express their affections in a time when personal expressions were discouraged. Early American began to exchange handmade Valentines in the early 1700's and the first mass produced, printed cards appeared on the scene in the 1840s created by Esther A. Howland . Today, Valentines Day is second only to Christmas as the most profitable holiday for America's greeting cards companies, and a lucrative time for florists and candy manufacturers as well.
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