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The More Recent History of Valentine's Day...
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Yes, there is more. Why the heck is it called "Valentine's Day" and not "The Feast of Purification Day" like it used to? No, it wasn't so teachers could spend an entire day correcting first graders in the pronunciation of the holiday, though that is just one of the added bonuses. Here is the history from the handy Answers.com [it really does have most, if not all, the answers (except for the meaning of life)].

"Legend has it that a certain third-century priest named Valentine persisted in performing marriage ceremonies despite a ban by the Roman emperor Claudius II (Claudius was persuaded that single men made better soldiers for his army). Thrown into jail, Valentine formed a relationship with his jailor's daughter (some say he cured her blindness) and he signed his last message to her "From your Valentine," a phrase which still gets a lot of mileage.

St. Valentine was executed on February 14, circa the year 270, and his remains (probably his, but there were two other Christian martyrs called Valentine) are now on display in the Whitefriar Street Carmelite Church in Dublin.

There are also reports of an ancient pagan custom that took place in preparation for the Roman festival of Lupercalia, which started February 15. The names of the town's maidens would be collected and then drawn at random by the local bachelors; in this fashion couples were paired off for the year.

[What did I tell you?]

Third, medieval Europeans thought February 14 was the date on which the birds started to mate. (There's no record of when the bees started.) From "Parlement of Foules," a poem by Chaucer:
"for this was on seynt Volantynys day/ Whan euery bryd comyth there to chese his mate.

Starting on Valentine's Day 1400, the French royal court held a Cour Amoreuse, in which ministers met after mass in "joyous recreation and talk about love." Love poems were presented before the ladies, who judged them and awarded a golden crown for the best one.

St. Valentine's Day was on the official Church list of feast days from 496, when Pope Gelasius I established it, until 1969, when Pope Paul VI dropped it from the calendar.

The first valentine on record was sent in 1415 by Charles, duke of Orleans, to his wife while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London. That message is on display in the British Library. In the 1840s a Massachusetts woman called Esther Howland came up with the idea of mass-producing Valentine's Day cards; now, about a billion are sent yearly, mostly by women.
"

And then I must elaborate on the Claudius's ban of marriage. Answers, sadly, failed me a bit on that one...

You see, Claudius thought that single men made better soldiers BECAUSE they wouldn't have a wife at home to worry about. And in the Roman army you had to survive a 25 year service [holy cow!] before you could get paid. So you couldn't support a family on the teeny bit of allowance the soldiers got before their service was up. And if the soldiers didn't have a wife to worry about or support, then they could fight more valiantly, etc. etc. etc.

There. From my two entries you now have pretty much the complete history of Valentine's Day. Kind of.

Over and Out,
Twilight





 
 
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