By Edwin Cooney
Originally posted February 2007
I wasn’t
going to write about this subject. I really wasn’t! Then, someone
wanted to know:
“What
does love have to do with Valentine’s Day?”
The
inquirer went on to say that she wasn’t putting the romantic aspect of
Valentine’s Day down, but she suspects that Valentine’s Day has more meaning
for greeting card and candy companies than it does for lovers.
Cynical
as this question may sound on its surface, it seems that this lady is in rather
good company. The late great comedian Will Rogers spent nearly a half
hour of radio time on Mother’s Day 1935 expounding on the observation that
florists benefit as much if not more than mothers do from Mother’s Day.
Noting that florists, of course, have mothers too, Rogers went on to observe
that florists invariably “…got more flowers than they got mothers!”
When one
thinks real hard about it, February 14th is a rather strange time of
the year to be celebrating romance. I would guess that most think of
romance as being associated with flowers—just as mothers are so
associated. Since Mother’s Day is celebrated the second Sunday in May,
just at the peak of the spring flower season, one would think that Valentine’s
Day might be the third Sunday of May or perhaps the second Saturday of
May. Then the florists would have a truly gigantic bonanza of a
weekend! However, if I’m going to be responsive to the inquiry (what
does love have to do with Valentine’s Day?), I suppose I’d better
stop fantasizing and lay out the facts and fables as I’ve found them.
Valentine’s
Day had its roots in pagan Rome. Each year in ancient Rome, the ides of
February would find the good citizens of Rome celebrating the festival of
eroticism which was called the Lupercalia. Lupercalia celebrated the
Goddess Juno Februata of febris (“fever” of love.)
With the
coming of Christianity, there was a movement to replace what Christians thought
of as the sinful celebration of the flesh with a more spiritual festival.
At first Christian clerics sought to coax the good citizens of Rome to
celebrate the virtues of their favorite saint and to do the celebrating on the
day before Lupercalia which traditionally began on February the
fifteenth. However, even as Rome was becoming increasingly dedicated to Christianity,
somehow piety was something the people found hard to get excited over.
Then
suddenly things changed about 269 A. D.
It seems
that Emperor Claudius II was finding it hard to get men to enlist in the army
he was trying to put together for fighting his most recent war.
The specific problem was that too many men were getting married and were thus
exempt from the Emperor’s draft. The only solution to that was to hand
down a decree outlawing romance and marriage—at least for the present.
Enter the
priest who would be known as Saint Valentine. (His actual name was
Valentinus.)
Valentinus
began secretly marrying young couples in defiance of the Emperor’s
decree. This wouldn’t do, of course, and one dark night, just as he was
performing a secret marriage, he and the couple he was marrying heard soldiers
outside. Fortunately, the couple got away, but Valentinus, not being as
agile as he used to be, got caught.
Thrown
into prison and sentenced to death, he was visited by hundreds of couples who agreed
with him that Claudius the Cruel’s decree was terrible.
While he
was awaiting execution, the daughter of his jailor was blinded by a disease and
Valentinus was able to cure her. Hence, she fell in love with
Valentinus. However, being the chaste man that he was and since he was
about to die, he couldn’t marry the young lady even in the wake of her intense
longing.
On the
day of his scheduled execution, he sent her a note which he signed:
“With
Love from your Valentine!”
Shortly
thereafter, the good priest Valentinus was beaten and decapitated. In 496
A.D., Pope Gelasius declared Valentinus a Saint and urged that every February
fourteenth be celebrated as a day of romance thus superseding Lupercalia.
The
mother of modern Valentine’s Day is Esther Howland of Worcester,
Massachusetts. Born in 1828, Miss Howland graduated from Mount Holyoke
Female Academy in 1847. About that time, she received a Valentine from a
friend in Britain which, she decided, she could reproduce as well if not even
better than the one she’d been sent. Her father, who owned a book and
stationary store in Worcester, ordered some lace paper and Esther put together
some samples for the catalogue that was being made up by the store.
It was
Esther’s hope to get about two hundred orders once her brother had distributed
the catalogue, but she ended up with the unbelievable number of over five
thousand orders. She first advertised her Valentines as messages of
romance in the Daily Spy, a local newspaper, on February 5, 1850. By the
time she sold the business, Esther Howland was quite a rich lady. Miss
Howland wasn’t the first person to send a valentine, but she certainly was the
major force that popularized the valentine in increasingly commercial America.
Esther Howland died in 1904 at the age of seventy-six, believe it or not—a
maiden.
Love
doesn’t always prevail on February fourteenth. For example, if you were
one of four opponents of gangster Al Capone on Thursday, February 14, 1929, the
machine gun blasts you felt pumped into your heart in that Chicago garage may
have come from Al’s heart, but they could hardly be described as being of the
heart—not even Al’s!
For most
of us, Valentine’s Day has been pretty lovely. February 14, 1859 and 1912
saw the admission into our Union of the states of Oregon and Arizona as the
thirty-third and forty-eighth states respectively. Comedian Jack Benny
was born on Valentine’s Day in 1894. And, the first planeload of American
prisoners of war from North Vietnam arrived in California on Valentine’s Day
1973.
Can you
recall a favorite valentine card from childhood? I can: it was in the
shape of a dump truck and it was sent me by my foster brother Danny. Its
message was simple:
“Here’s a
load of love for you on Valentine’s Day.”
No, it
certainly wasn’t romantic, but it came from the only person who has ever
considered me to be his brother. Thus I’ll carry the memory of that
valentine for the rest of my life!
Not all
love is erotic, feverish, or romantic, nor should it be--but it is something
else quite special.
Love is
definitely what makes Valentine’s Day!
RESPECTFULLY
SUBMITTED,
EDWIN
COONEY
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