Saint Valentine’s Day, Interesting Facts for Knowledge Lovers

Saint Valentine’s Day, observed on February 14 each year, is a fascinating festival of romantic love, when people show appreciation for their loved ones and friends. The celebration of the Feast of Saint Valentine is commonly accompanied with symbols of love, hearts, red roses, images and models of Cupid. On Valentine’s Day lovers, family members and friends exchange greeting cards, letters, flowers, chocolates and other gifts, arrange romantic meals or weekend breaks. People who have romantic feelings for somebody often use the occasion to make this known. Valentine’s Day is also a popular date for getting engaged and for weddings.

Valentine’s Day is celebrated with great fervor in many countries around the world, even though it is not a state recognized holiday and remains a working day in most of them. It is the second most celebrated holiday around the world after New Year’s Day and the second-largest holiday for giving greeting cards, after Christmas. Traditions related with this holiday vary from country to country but everywhere the day is focused on romance, love, appreciation and friendship.

However, romantic atmosphere is not the only one virtue of Saint Valentine’s Day. It is also featured with an interesting historical background. The origins of this joyful holiday are rather vague and gloomy. There are many theories but the most popular of them claims that Valentine’s Day evolved from the story of Saint Valentine, who was a Roman priest during the reign of Claudius II. Claudius prohibited marriage during wartime because single men were better soldiers. Valentine disobeyed the Emperor and performed secret wedding ceremonies. For this, he was jailed and then martyred around February 14 in the year 270 CE. According to legend, being in jail, Valentine wrote a love note to the jailor’s daughter with whom he had fallen in love. He signed his letter: “From your Valentine.” So it was St. Valentine himself who sent the first valentine. In fact, there were at least three different Saint Valentines throughout history: one was a priest, another one a bishop and one more is just known for being a martyr. The priest’s and bishop’s stories are so closely related that it is difficult to tell which St. Valentine the holiday is named after.

The church used the day of St Valentine’s martyrdom to Christianize the old Roman Lupercalia, an ancient fertility festival held around the middle of February. On the eve of Lupercalia, young unmarried men draw names of young women in a lottery and they were paired off for the next year. Ancient Romans believed that birds also chose their mates on February 14th. In 496 A.D., Pope Gelasius assigned February 14 to honor St. Valentine in order to disassociate this date with the Lupercalia festival. Unlike the ancient tradition, the Christian church replaced girls’ names by saints’ names and the participant was supposed to model his life after the saint whose name he drew from the box. However, in the Middle Ages the girls’ names got back again and young people started to draw names from a bowl to see who their valentines would be. Eventually St. Valentine’s Day became associated with romance, exchanging love notes, presentation of flowers and confections.

Valentine cards were always a very popular part of the Valentine’s Day celebrations. Traditionally, lovers exchanged handwritten valentines. The oldest surviving valentine was written by Charles, the Duke of Orleans, who sent it on Valentine’s Day to his wife after being captured in 1415. In the seventeenth century a new sophisticated variant of Valentine cards – True Love Knots – became extremely popular in the U.S. and England. These Valentines were drawn as a knot and were readable from any line and still made sense. Commercial cards appeared in the mid-19th century, when the interest in Valentine’s Day started to grow rapidly. Early versions of these cards were fashioned of satin and lace and ornamented with flowers, ribbons, and images of cupids or birds. Today, about 1 billion Valentine cards are exchanged in the U.S. each year.

Interestingly, the most Valentine’s Day cards are given to teachers. Statistically, teachers receive more Valentine cards than kids, mothers, wives, sweethearts and pets. The fact, that students use this romantic holiday as an opportunity to express their gratitude to those people who are planting the seeds of knowledge into their young minds, gives grounds for considering Saint Valentine’s Day also a day of a Love for Learning. So, don’t forget to send a greeting card to your favorite tutor. Happy Valentine’s Day!