Dot Com History of Valentine's Day

Every year since we were little girls, my Dad has given both my sister and I a chocolate heart and a card on February 14th. The card is always witty or humorous, just like Dad, and is always signed “Happy Valentine’s Day. Love, Dad.” The chocolate heart is always the same every year: four little pieces of candy in a small, heart-shaped box. Very sweet. I wondered what compelled my father, and countless other men, to purchase items such as these to “celebrate” a holiday in the middle of February. Why February14? Where did this Valentine’s Day come from, with its red hearts, candy and cards? Why don’t people just give money instead, which I would have preferred over the diet-killing chocolate? (Here’s a hint for next year Dad!) For this assignment, armed only with a Google search engine and my four pieces of chocolate, I went in search of the history of Valentine’s Day.

The origins of this “lovely” holiday are not exactly clear. Some claim that Valentine’s Day dates back to the Middle Ages when the feast was called Lupercalia, an ancient Roman pagan fertility celebration held on February 15. According to University of Notre Dame Professor Lawrence Cunningham, women would write love letters, known as billets, and place them in a large urn. A man would randomly draw a note from the urn and pursue the woman who had written the letter.[1] Another variation on Lupercalia claims that Roman priests, members of the order of Luperci, sacrificed a goat and a dog, sliced the goat hide into strips, dipped the strips in the blood and went around slapping both women and crops with the goat hide.[2] The goat hide was known as Februa, derived from the Latin Februatio for the “act of lashing with a sacred thong,” or goat hide.[3] Far from being horrified by the spectacle, women actually hoped they would be slapped with the goat hide because they believed it would make them more fertile in the coming year.

But the pagan connection was too distasteful for Pope Gelasius. In 496 A.D., he decided to Christianize the holiday in honor of St. Valentine, a young Roman martyred by Emperor Claudius II on February 14, 270 C.E. for his Christian beliefs.[4] According to folklore, right before he died, the jailed Valentine wrote a note to his jailer’s daughter, whom he had become enamored of, and signed it “from your Valentine.” But the identity of Valentine is also shrouded in mystery. According to www.hersheys.com, a Saint Valentine of Rome and a Saint Valentine of Terni, both known for their loving and compassionate acts, were martyred on the same day, February 14, leading to speculation that these two men were actually the same man. The Catholic Church, however, recognizes at least three different saints named Valentine or Valentinus who were martyred on the same day![5]

The goat hide and martyred Valentine not withstanding, other scholars attribute the holiday to renowned bard Geoffrey Chaucer. Henry Ansgar Kelly, director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of California Los Angeles, and author of “Chaucer and the Cult of St. Valentine,” believes that in 1381, Chaucer was in the midst of composing a poem for Richard II in honor of his engagement to Anne of Bohemia. The engagement was announced on May 3rd. Chaucer discovered that a Saint Valentine had a feast day on May 3rd and penned a poem entitled “The Parliament of Fowls” in honor of the engagement.[6] Chaucer ventured to guess that birds mate on May 3rd. After Chaucer died in 1400, the Valentine’s Day celebration was moved from May to February because “the first songbirds that traditionally warble after a blustery winter tend to debut in mid-February,” according the Kelly.[7] Fifteen years after Chaucer’s death, another imprisoned man, Charles, Duke of Orleans, sent a Valentine’s greeting to his wife from his cell in the Tower of London.[8] By 1660, Charles II officially recognized Valentine’s Day in Great Britain and the printing of greeting cards followed shortly thereafter.

In the United States, Valentine’s Day arrived with the Puritans, but it would be over 100 years before the first Valentine’s Day cards made their debut in American society. In 1847, Ester Howland began mass producing Valentine’s Day cards. Made with real lace, ribbons and leaves, her cards became the “hallmark” (excuse the pun!) of the holiday.[9] The real Hallmark cards, created by the Hall Brothers, appeared for their first Valentine’s Day in 1913.[10] But where did Ms. Howland and the Hall Brothers come up with the idea for heart-shaped cards? As far back as the 12th century, the medical community believed that the heart was the source for love and affection in the human body, although a human heart is not exactly shaped in the traditional sense of a heart as is known today. The Valentine’s Day heart derived from a doodle that was supposed to represent a human female’s buttocks or a well-endowed female torso according to interpretations of the doodle![11] Flowers had a less risqué association with the holiday. It seems as though Charles II of Sweden brought the “language of flowers” to Europe. Flowers such as lilacs and lilies represented some form of affection, but the rose became the symbol of love.[12]

Last, but certainly not least, conversation candy hearts have been a tradition associated with Valentine’s Day since the American Civil War. The hearts originally had printed paper notes tucked inside with poetic inscriptions such as “please send a lock of your hair by return mail.”[13] Ah yes, NECCO Sweethearts Conversation Hearts have been the Cyrano for lovers for years. The candy was first factory-made in 1902 and bore such familiar phrases as “Kiss Me” and “Be Mine.”[14] However, Walter Marshall, a retired NECCO vice president, admits that coming up with love-based slogans for the candy is much more of a challenge than people think. As the candy comes in either ½ inch or ¾ inch, two words ranging in length from four to six letters is all there is room for. (I guess “Dad Need Money” would not fit on one heart!) However, thanks to the age of text messages and email with their abbreviated vernacular, phrases such as “EZ 2 Luv” are helping to replace the old, worn-out “Be Mine.”[15]

Although the history of Valentine’s Day has a somewhat interesting past with its bloodied goat hide, imprisoned and martyred men, butt doodles and “Be Mine” candies, rest assured, the holiday is indeed still popular. And while I know why “75% of chocolate purchases are made by women all year long,” it is not so much of a mystery now why “during the days and minutes before Valentine’s Day, 75% of the chocolate purchases are made by men.”[16] Dad, next year, leave a $20!


II. Commentary on the Experience

For this assignment, I must admit that I was not terribly concerned with the accuracy of the information I was obtaining online. Because I was barred from the safety of JSTOR and credible academic sources I am used to consulting for historical information, I was actually looking for, and expecting, outlandish renditions of the history of Valentine’s Day. That is not to say that I did not take the assignment seriously. It would have been out of character for me had I not. But knowing that the World Wide Web is a font of less-than-credible information in some instances, I was ready to accept whatever the Google search yielded. Surprisingly, the sites that I visited all told the same tale of the history of Valentine’s Day in one form or another. All of the sites mentioned a martyred Saint Valentine and the Roman feast of Lupercalia. The site reporting that the origins of the Valentine heart derived from a doodle of a behind or a well-endowed female torso was just too comical to exclude from my narrative. I included references from www.history.com and www.cnn.com because I thought they were interesting and perhaps a bit more accurate than www.howstuffworks.com. As of yet, I still have not consulted JSTOR or ProQuest to find the “real” history of Valentine’s Day, so I do not know if the web sites I found were fairly accurate. This assignment demonstrates the vulnerability of people to information they find on the web. Taken at face value, what is online can be believed as the absolute truth. I am more inclined to think, however, that news sites such as www.washingtonpost.com or www.nytimes.com are posting factual pieces. But private sites, such as www.brownielocks.com, are in more of a position to dissuade. Anything can be posted online, truthful or not, by someone with a web site. I stayed away from Wikipedia because I have no faith in the accuracy of the information contained on that site. I hate to sound like an internet snob, but credentials count. Seeing is not always believing!