Valentine’s Day conjures up images of mischievous cherubs, decadent chocolates, red roses, candlelit dinners for two, love poems, secret admirers and above all - romance. But how did this holiday get started? Was there really a St. Valentine? And why is it celebrated in February?

Like Easter and Christmas, Valentine’s Day is an amalgam of Pagan and Christian beliefs: Our story begins in third century Rome during the reign of Emperor Claudius II. His penchant for bloody military campaigns earned him the moniker “Claudius the Cruel.” Perhaps he should have been called “Claudius the Dense” because after concluding that single men made better soldiers than those with wives and families, his solution was to simply ban marriage - as though a decree against such unions would prevent romance from distracting his men.

Meanwhile, a kindly priest named Valentine took pity on young bachelors and secretly performed marriage vows for them and their sweethearts. When Claudius discovered this, he had Valentine arrested and attempted to convert him to paganism. Good Christian that he was, Valentine retaliated by attempting to convert Claudius to his faith. Neither succeeded. However, according to legend, Valentine fell in love with the jailer’s daughter while awaiting trial. Before his execution, he sent her love letters, signing them “from your Valentine,” an expression that continues to this day.

As for the date we celebrate in his honor, it is often claimed that St. Valentine was beheaded on February 14th in 270 A.D. but no one really knows for sure. A more likely explanation is that mid-February coincides with the ancient Roman holiday of Lupercalia. Lupercalia was a fertility festival dedicated to Faunus, the Roman god of agriculture, as well as to Romulus and Remus, Rome’s founders.

This festival kicked off with the Luperci (an order of Roman priests) gathering at the sacred cave where Romulus and Remus were reportedly reared by a she-wolf or ‘lupa.’ The Luperci would then sacrifice a goat (for fertility) and a dog (for purification). Next, the goat’s hide was sliced into strips, dipped in sacrificial blood and handed out to the young men. The teens would then race through the streets of Rome merrily slapping women and fields of crops with the blood-soaked goat hide.(You can’t make this stuff up!)

Women welcomed this because they believed it would enhance their fertility in the coming year. Later, all the single ladies in town would place their names in a big urn. Whether they welcomed this part or not, one can only speculate, for the city’s bachelors would each draw a name at random from that urn. The person they chose would be their sexual partner for the next year. These matches often ended in marriage, but it wasn’t mandatory.

In 498 A.D., Pope Gelasius outlawed this ‘love lottery’ and declared February 14th to be St. Valentine’s Day. As a substitute for the Lupercalian traditions, the Roman priests encouraged young men to draw the names of Saints instead of young women, the idea being that they should emulate the holy qualities of that particular saint for the following year. (Needless to say, the young men of Rome were not too thrilled by these changes.) Later, in the middle ages, it was commonly believed in France and England that February 14th was the start of mating season for birds, an idea that helped cement this day’s reputation as a day of love.

Still, it was not until the seventeenth century that Valentine’s Day caught on as a popular holiday in Great Britain. By the mid-eighteenth century, it was common for friends and lovers in all social classes to exchange small gifts and affectionate notes on this day. The custom caught on in America at roughly the same time. And when Esther A. Howland began selling the first mass-produced Valentines in 1840, the tradition really took off.

These days an estimated one billion Valentine’s Day cards are exchanged each year according to the Greeting Card Association. Interestingly enough, roughly 85% of all Valentine’s are purchased by women.

And now for a dollop of Valentine’s Day trivia:

• Hand-carved wooden spoons were once traditional Valentine’s gifts in Wales. Hearts, keys and keyholes were common motifs on these ‘love spoons’ with the implied message being, “You unlock my heart!”
• In the Middle Ages, men and women would draw names from a bowl then wear their Valentine’s name on their sleeves for the period of one week. The expression “to wear one’s heart on one’s sleeve” was derived from this tradition.
• In the Middle Ages, Europeans believed that if a woman saw a robin on Valentine’s Day, it meant she would marry a sailor. If she saw a goldfinch, her husband would be wealthy. If she saw a sparrow, however, she would marry a pauper, but still attain great happiness.

So happy Valentine’s Day, everybody! Bet you didn’t know that this sweet holiday had such a wacky past. For more information on the reason we use the heart as a symbol of love, check out Bleeding Espresso’s post The Heart as a Symbol of Love