The History of Valentine’s day

Valentine’s day is one of the more commercialized holidays. Each year corporations take the opportunity to push sales for romantic ready-made cards. While this does not actually detract from the romantic meaning of the holiday, it makes people like myself skeptical of its legitimacy. For those unaware of the holiday’s origins, it is easy to jump to the conclusion that the greeting card companies invented it. That was my opinion until I researched deeper into the background surrounding Valentine’s Day.

According to legend, St. Valentine was a Roman Christian priest during the third century A.D. This was towards the end of the Roman Empire, and barbarian tribes, including the Gauls, Turks, Slavs, and Huns were encroaching on the borders of the Roman Empire. The Emperor Claudius decided that he needed the best soldiers in this time of danger. He concluded that married men did not make good soldiers because of their emotional attachments to their families. Therefore, he banned marriage in order to make men better soldiers. This of course caused a lot of discontent among the populace, because of their inability to marry their loved ones.

Valentine was a Christian bishop who felt that such a decree was unjust and unchristian. He began to meet couples in secret and to marry them. When he was discovered, Valentine was brought before Emperor Claudius. The Emperor was impressed with the priest’s conviction, and attempted to convert him to the Roman gods. His attempt was unsuccessful and Valentine was sentenced to death. While he was imprisoned, Valentine’s jailer asked him to help his blind daughter. According to legend, one of the miracles St. Valentine performed was to cure the jailer’s daughter of her blindness. The legend ends with St. Valentine writing the first Valentine, which was a note to the jailer’s daughter that ended with “From your Valentine.”

Valentine’s day began to be popularly celebrated in Great Britain around the 1600s. It only became common for people of all social classes to exchange love notes in the middle of the 1700s. Like many aspects of British culture, this practice also migrated to the American colonies. However, it was not until the 1840s that Valentine’s Day cards began being produced en masse. The person responsible for this commercialization was Esther A. Howland. Howland was a young entrepreneur that was surprised to find a large demand for Valentine’s cards. She took advantage of the holiday and started a business that eventually grew large enough to gross one hundred thousand dollars annually, which, at the time, was a very significant sum of money.

Today, Valentine’s Day is a widely celebrated holiday. However, it has, and never will be, an important enough holiday to suspend work or school. The holiday is a luxury, it is not religious in nature, and does not really provide any significant service to society, other than to boost card consumption. Yet, it gives people a reason to celebrate their love for each other, so I am sure it will always remain popular.