by Kris Neri with the Femmes Fatales
What does Valentine’s Day mean to you? For some, who are happily committed, it’s the most romantic day of the year. Yet cynics often regard it as a fake holiday started by the greeting card companies to boost card sales between Christmas and Easter.
Turns out the cynics are wrong. According to the History Channel, while some believe that Valentine’s Day is celebrated in the middle of February to commemorate the anniversary of Saint Valentine’s death or burial–which probably occurred around A.D. 270–others claim that the Christian church may have decided to place St. Valentine’s feast day in the middle of February in an effort to “Christianize” the pagan celebration of Lupercalia. Celebrated at the ides of February, or February 15, Lupercalia was a fertility festival dedicated to Faunus, the Roman god of agriculture, as well as to the Roman founders Romulus and Remus.
To begin the festival, members of the Luperci, an order of Roman priests, would gather at a sacred cave where the infants Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, were believed to have been cared for by a she-wolf or lupa. The priests would sacrifice a goat, for fertility, and a dog, for purification. They would then strip the goat’s hide into strips, dip them into the sacrificial blood and take to the streets, gently slapping both women and crop fields with the goat hide. Far from being fearful, Roman women welcomed the touch of the hides because it was believed to make them more fertile in the coming year. 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. These matches often ended in marriage.
Okay, so not a fake holiday created by the card companies after all, but I do find the practice of just exchanging cards more appealing that being flogged by bloody goat skins.
The History Channel also shares that exchanging Valentine greetings were popular as far back as the Middle Ages, so the practice of sharing cards isn’t a recent invention either. The oldest known valentine still in existence today was 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.
Maybe we should thank the card companies for making such scribblings unnecessary.
But Valentine’s Day can also be a complicated holiday. Unattached singles sometimes find it an unpleasant reminder of their single-state. Newer dating couples are often unsure what if anything they should exchange, since the holiday seems to force a commitment that isn’t there yet. And some committed couples think that love should be celebrated every day, instead of just once a year. Even kids sometimes feel the hurt, when classmates exclude them from valentine distribution lists.
So, what do you do in your life? Joe and I exchange cards, but not gifts. And we haven’t gone out to dinner on Valentine’s Day since our reservation was pushed back by an hour once years ago, and we suffered through bad service and an undercooked dinner on a night that does stress kitchen staffs. We enjoy cooking together at home instead. Still, I have friends who wouldn’t dream of missing that date-night out, no matter what the service is like.
How about you? What does Valentine’s Day mean to you? How do you and your sweetie celebrate it?