The Origin of Valentine's Day

Valentine’s Day is one of the most popular holidays in the world dedicated to love and romance. On February 14 lovers, spouses and admirers send cards, flowers and chocolates to each other as a token of their love and devotion. Interestingly enough though Valentine’s Day is common in the western world, in recent times the holiday has found increasing appeal in other parts of the world, particularly Asia, thanks to the both the cultural and economic influence of globalization. But how did this immensely popular holiday come about and indeed what is the origin of Valentine’s Day?

To a great extent the popularity of Valentine’s Day owes to the coming together of two mainstream traditions – the Christian as promoted by the Church and its rituals as well as the so-called pagan which is rooted in the rhythms of nature and cycle of seasons. According to the former Christian tradition, Valentine’s Day is celebrated in honor of Saint Valentine; however the Catholic Church recognizes at least three different saints named Valentine or Valentinus, all of whom were martyred at different points in history. Today the Saint Valentine who is ostensibly associated with the holiday is believed to be a priest who lived in during third century B.C and more particularly in the rule of the Roman Emperor Claudius II.The Roman king believed that unmarried men made better soldiers than those with wives and families, so he decided to make it illegal for young men to marry. The priest Valentine took pity on the young soldiers who were not permitted to marry or see their sweethearts. He thus became an advocate of these young lovers and began to perform secret marriages. But Valentine was soon found out and jailed. Emperor Claudius II attempted to convert the priest into worshipping the Roman gods, but the latter refused. Instead, he tried to convert Claudius to Christianity and was eventually sentenced to be executed.  According to some versions of Valentine’s history, the priest was put to death for helping Christians escape harsh Roman prisons, where they were often beaten and tortured.

The association of Valentine with romance is further strengthened according to a legend which tells that Valentine fell in love with his jailer’s daughter. Just before his death, he sent her a note and signed it “from your Valentine”, a tradition that is followed even today on Valentine’s Day. For all these reasons an aura of romance, heroism and sympathy enveloped the figure of Valentine and those who knew about it spread his tale to places such as England and France till it eventually became a legend. In time the Catholic Church decided to honor the valiant priest with sainthood so that he became Saint Valentine and was popularly perceived by the larger populace as a patron saint of lovers.

The other strong tradition of Valentine’s Day goes back to the ancient Roman fertility festival of Lupercalia which was celebrated to herald the arrival of Spring. Held commonly on the ides of February which is actually February 15, the festival of Lupercalia marked the beginning of the season of growth as everything in nature and physical world blossomed with life and vitality. Associated with the festival was also homage paid to Romus and Remulus, the legendary founders of Rome. As part of the Lupercalian rituals, women and crops in the region would be touched with parts of the sacrificial goat in the belief that the act would confer fertility and good health. Later in the day, according to legend, all the young women in the city would place their names in a big urn. The city's bachelors would each choose a name and become paired for the year with his chosen woman. Not surprisingly, these matches often ended in marriage.

Being primarily a fertility festival, Lupercalia held in mid-February, was widely associated with love and full-blooded romance and continued to be celebrated even during the beginning of the Christian era. However with the increasing influence of the Catholic Church in the following centuries, it was banned as Unchristian and ‘pagan’ at around the end of fifth century A.D. Instead Pope Gelasius declared February 14 St. Valentine's Day in the hope that popular tradition of festivities and celebrations would acquire ostensibly a more Christian color. It was not until much later, however, that the day became definitively associated with love. During the Middle Ages, it was commonly believed in France and England that February 14 was the beginning of birds' mating season, which added to the idea that the middle of Valentine's Day should be a day for romance. Thus the fusion of religious tradition of Saint Valentine as well as the pre-Christian concepts of fertility and sexual vitality came about in the middle ages when young people began to celebrate this as the festival of love. Written Valentine messages though didn't begin to appear until after 1400. The oldest known valentine which exists today is a poem written in 1415 by Charles, Duke of Orleans, to his wife while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London following his capture at the Battle of Agincourt. The greeting is now part of the manuscript collection of the British Library in London, England.

Since late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Valentine’s Day began to be celebrated widely as a holiday dedicated to love and romance. It became customary for young people to gift their friends and lovers small tokens of love, hand-made valentines or hand-written messages. However the mass production of valentines took off In the 1840s and the credit for this goes to an American lady Esther A. Howland. Known as the “Mother of the Valentine,” Howland made elaborate creations with real lace, ribbons and colorful pictures known as "scrap"  and began selling them on a mass scale.  With the advancement and large scale availability of printing technology, printed Valentine’s Day cards made their appearance at the beginning of twentieth century. Ready-made cards were an easy way for people to express their emotions in a time not everyone was literate enough to put matters of heart in an eloquent way. Cheaper postage rates also contributed to an increase in the popularity of sending Valentine's Day greetings. Since then there has been no looking back and today approximately 150 million Valentine's Day cards are exchanged annually, making Valentine's Day the second most popular card-sending holiday after Christmas.