Origin of Valentine's Day

Though a cheesy, comically romantic holiday (and heavily commercialized) nowadays, Valentine's Day didn't just appear for lovers to celebrate their enamour for others, in fact the red colour that goes along with the holiday is probably more symbolic of the bloody history rather than hearts and kisses.

"Men hit on women by, well, hitting them"

Between the dates of February 13-15, Ancient romans celebrated the pagan festival of Lupercalia, in which men would enter a matchmaking lottery, and they would virtually own that woman for the rest of the holiday and perhaps even for life. Also at these festivals, the men would sacrifice one dog and one goat each, then continue to slap the women with the hides because that was said to endorse fertility. The women would even line up to get socked by the men, who were butt-naked.

"Many of the noble youths and of the magistrates run up and down through the city naked, for sport and laughter striking those they meet with shaggy thongs. And many women of rank also purposely get in their way, and like children at school present their hands to be struck, believing that the pregnant will thus be helped in delivery, and the barren to pregnancy."

(Talk about misogyny??) Anyways, this event was most likely responsible for the sexual, fertile themes that surround Valentine's day.

Saint Valentine(s)

Then, in the fifth century Pope Gelasius I decided to create a new holiday in hopes of people forgetting Lupercalia (He basically said to stop slapping women with dead animals, but in an extremely ribald manner) and named it Valentine's day, in memory of two roman martyrs that, oddly enough, were both killed by Roman Emperor Claudius Gothic II on February 14 in two different years during 3rd century AD. The first was an Italian bishop who was incarcerated for practicing Christianity in a pagan world. When in prison, he met and fell in love with the prison guard's blind daughter, and became an interlocutor and signed his letters, "Love, your Valentine." Thus starting the tradition of having a valentine that is still carried today. The second occurred when Emperor Claudius decided that bachelors made better soldiers than those with families and spouses, so he banned marriage for young men. Then came Valentine, who began to perform marriages for young couples in secret as a hopeless romantic himself. Eventually he was caught and sentenced to death. Both were beheaded.

Alas, the history of V-day has an actually pretty grotesque and incongruous history, opposite to what it represents today. In fact nowadays it has taken an even sharper turn and, as I said above, become extremely commercialized and capitalized. In 2016, consumers spent 19.7 billion dollars in the US for Valentine's Day festivities. Valentine's Day is also the second most popular holiday to buy cards, with over 150 million cards exchanged annually, just behind Christmas.

Should it be Valentine's day or Hallmark day? Who knows?

That's all for today! See you tomorrow for day 4! Happy slap your girlfriend with dead animal skins! (I'm kidding, please don't)

Love, Isabela :)