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Valentine’s Day is here again. One of the nation’s most popular holidays, Valentine’s Day is one of the most anticipated events of the year. If you care to check you will see that over 62% of the adults celebrate it. Teenagers are absolutely crazy about Valentine’s Day, while those in their 30s spend it in the company of their partners, friends and family.
Valentine’s Day this year is only a month away from today. While most people are already getting in the others, others have already gotten busy trying to figure out ways to celebrate it. The day is also considered auspicious for engagement proposals.
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Whether you are crazy about this day or just simply join the chorus out of mild excitement, do not feel pressured to live up to the hype. Instead, just kick back and enjoy it your way.
Here we have put together a light crisp read for you on Valentine’s Day that covers the most interesting aspects of the event. Take a look.
Saint Valentine
Valentine’s Day is originally St. Valentine’s Days, also called the Feast of Saint Valentine. The story of St. Valentine that has survived today is a masterly weave of fact and fiction. St. Valentine who was officially called Satin Valentine of Rome was a 3rd century Roman cleric who was commemorated on the 14th of February. The day caught on its tradition of romantic courtly love from the High Middle Age. Historians have found out that the only reliable piece of information on the elusive St. Valentine is that he was buried at the Via Flaminia cemetery in northern Rome. We do not know for certain if St. Valentine was one person or a pseudonym for multiple persons.
A Brief History
In the late 400s, it was Pope Gelasius who declared 14th February as Valentine’s Day honouring the saint. However, back then, it was still far from being recognized as the universal celebration of love. It was in the 1300s when Valentine’s Day came to have a romantic connotation. 3 centuries later, in the 1600s, Europe opened up to the tradition of swapping valentines cards on this day. However, it was not until the 1840s that Valentine's cards came to be mass produced in the US of A.
Myths and Legends
The festival is said to have begun in ancient Rome. What started off as Lupercalia, which was basically a fertility festival held in the middle of February, is now celebrated as the Valentine’s Day. Although the link between the two ceremonies isn’t clear, it is believed in most cultures that the two have overlapping themes, and are therefore one and the same.
Around 200 to 300 AD at least two Christian saints by the name of Valentine were martyred. That makes it unclear where the fabled St. Valentine was one individual or many.
Nauseated by the hype that Valentine’s Day has grown into, a sect of people now believe that it is a holiday designed by hallmark to especially sell cards. While that largely explains the card exchanging ritual, the day is not an invention of Hallmark or any other cards manufacturing company. In fact, the mass card production for Valentine’s Days hadn’t even started until 1850 when a certain Esther A. Howland pioneered the culture.
Some of those who are not aware of the roots of the celebration believe that Valentine’s Day was always a holiday sanctioned especially for lovers. In truth, the day always has had an association with love, but it was the celebrated author Geoffrey Chaucer who connected romance with Valentine’s Day first in his epic novel the Canterbury Tales. Up until then, it was a day to commemorate the martyred St. Valentine or St. Valentines.
