Valentine’s Day: A Bittersweet Holiday

Amid all of the candlelight dinners, pink flowers, Dove chocolate wrappers and tacky Hallmark greeting cards, it’s easy to forget the true origins of Valentine’s Day. The darker underbelly of this sugar-coated holiday reveals a few skeletons in the metaphorical closet of history that America has been all too willing to forget.
Take, for example, one of the many legends surrounding St. Valentine, which tells us that he was a 3rd Century Roman Priest sentenced to death by Emperor Claudius III. Allegedly, the emperor decided that single men made better soldiers than those with wives and families, so he outlawed marriage for young men — his crop of potential soldiers. St. Valentine, realizing the injustice of the decree, defied Claudius and continued to perform marriages for young lovers in secret. When Claudius found out about this, he put an end to the man’s life, and made a hero of him in the process.
Another legend suggests that St. Valentine might have been killed for attempting to help Christians escape from Roman prisons, where they were often beaten and tortured mercilessly. Rumor has it that, while he was behind bars, St. Valentine fell in love with a young girl who visited him during his confinement. Before his death, he wrote her a letter signed ‘From Your Valentine,’ an expression that stuck around longer than he did. Both of these myths are murky, but they portray Valentine as a sympathetic, heroic, and romantic character. By the Middle Ages, Valentine was one of the most popular saints in France and England.
As for the date—February 14th—some claim that the Christian church may have decided to celebrate a Valentine’s feast day in the middle of February in an effort to ‘christianize’ celebrations of the pagan Lupercalia festival. In ancient Rome, this festival was 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 the 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. The boys then sliced the goat’s hide into strips, dipped them in the sacrificial blood and took to the streets, slapping women with the goathide strips. Roman women welcomed being touched with the hides because it was believed the strips would make them more fertile in the coming year.
Let’s also not forget about the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre of 1929: the Prohibition-era conflict that took place in Chicago between South Side Italian gang member Al Capone and North Side Irish gang member Bugs Moran. Seven people died in the process.
Moral of the Story: while you are enjoying dinner and a movie with your dearly beloved, just take a moment to remember all of the brave people that died so you could indulge in your teddy bears and candy hearts.