Don’t forget to bring something special to your loved ones next week, as Wednesday is Valentine’s Day!
The holiday is named after the Christian Saint, Valentine. Common tellings of St. Valentine’s story are set when marriage was banned in the Roman Empire by Emperor Claudius II. St. Valentine continued wedding young lovers despite the law and was punished with a beheading, which is said to have happened on February 14. However, some scholars attribute the holiday as a Christian retelling of the Roman holiday of Lupercalia, which happened with many of our current holidays.
Lupercalia was the Roman Festival of Fertility. Priests would sacrifice animals for fertility and purification in a cave that was believed to be where Romulus and Remes, the founders of Rome, were raised by a wolf. Later in the day, the men would be paired with a woman for the year, and these arrangements often resulted in marriage.
The modern Valentine’s traces back to 1415, when Charles, Duke of Orleans sent Valentine’s poems to his wife while she was a prisoner in the Tower of London. Greetings and poems became commonplace in the 1700s as a way for people to express their emotions when the culture otherwise forbade them. By 1900, handwritten cards were out of favor for printed ones, and small tokens of gratitude were given.
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