Origin of Valentine's Day

Well, it is the wonderful and happy day that is Valentine’s Day! I thought I would share the origin of Valentine’s Day with you all and the story may not be what you thought.

There are a few different St. Valentine’s known, and with each different Valentine comes a different story. One such story is the Valentine was a Priest who was alive during the reign of Claudius II in Rome. Claudius felt that young, single men performed better in battle, possibly because they weren’t preoccupied with concerns for their wife and children at home, and he outlawed marriage for young men. Valentine defied Claudius and continued to perform marriages and was imprisoned. What a beautiful story of love!

Another possibility is that Valentine had been imprisoned for some other deed, perhaps helping Christians to escape the Roman dungeons. The man who guarded Valentine had a daughter who regularly visited him and so came to know Valentine as well. Before he was executed he sent her a note, signing it ‘From Your Valentine’. Sound familiar?

All in all, as lovely and romantic (and ghastly) those stories sound, historians believe that the Christian Church picked a holiday close to the Pagan holiday known as Lupercalia, to sort of, “Christianize” and make it simpler for the pagans to stop celebrating their holiday.

Lupercalia was celebrated on the Ides of February (the 15^th), and was a celebration of fertility. The priests would sacrifice a goat for fertility and a dog for purification and then strip the skin off of the goat, dip it in blood, and go around slapping the women with the bloody skin.

…What?

Yes. They slapped the women with the blood-drenched skin of a goat. The women actually welcomed this! They believed it would make them more fertile. Whatever the reason, that is pretty gross. Interesting, but gross.

Here is the next rather interesting tidbit of information to share with your honey-bunny (or whomever you’d like); the women would then gather in the city and place their names in a large urn and then all those single men would go and draw a name from that urn. Those lucky women would then spend one year with this man. Most of these couples ended the year married and hopefully happily ever after.

So, whether you’re writing your sweetheart a love note from jail, marrying people you’re not supposed to (this goes both ways!), or you’re going around, putting your name in an urn, I hope you have a wonderful Valentine’s Day!

Sincerely

A










All information taken from this source: http://www.history.com/topics/valentines-day