As another springtime begins to thrust its courageous head forth after our (admittedly) short winter, there’s yet another holiday for us to contend with. Store windows are festooned with red and pink hearts; heavily armed, flying babies; and advertisements letting us know that the only real way to show our loved ones that we care is by spending money on cheap chocolate and chalky candies emblazoned with trite sentiment. Couples will block the sidewalk to stare deeply into one another’s eyes, and social media will be a cacophony of cringeworthy nonsense.
At the risk of sounding curmudgeonly, it stinks.
But while modern Valentine’s Day serves primarily to line the already-bulging pockets of Hallmark and Cadbury, it hasn’t always been such a saccharine lovefest.
It began, as so many of our high holy days do, as a pagan festival, this one held on February 15. Originally known as Februatus (Latin for “purifications,” and the root of the word “February”), it was held to purge Rome of her hibernal sins, so as to begin sinning again with a clean slate. At some point, this devolved into just getting good and drunk to start the awakening springtime off right, and they decided to involve Pan, patron god of making cows fertile, being lost in the forest, and some other things. Pan lived in a famous cave called Lupercal, so they changed the name of the festival to Lupercalia. This festival involved getting hammered and naked and chasing consenting ladies around in the cave with bits of bloody animal skin. You see, Pan was jazzed about this kind of thing and would make all the cows extra fertile. So much fun, right?
When Gelasius I, a pope who, by all accounts, was whiny and prudish, had had enough, he decided to subsume the pagans’ good time by declaring February 14, the day before Lupercalia, as Saint Valentine’s Day. This was to be celebrated by randomly being assigned a Saint from the saintly rolodex, and spending the next year acting like them. Since most saints were big nerds, this effectively precluded any pants-less carousing. However, if he had a specific Valentine in mind, he declined to tell anybody about it, and the knowledge died with him some years later. But, more than likely, he just wanted everybody to put their trousers back on and get down to the business of fearing the wrath of God. Just to really clear up his papal to-do list, he also made this mysterious Saint Valentine the patron of beekeeping, fainting, travellers, and anyone with epilepsy—his celestial purview is so much more than just love.
Where the confusion lies is that there were actually three martyred dudes named Valentine. There was Valentine of Rome, killed by beheading for performing secret marriages for soldiers to their sweethearts, whence the soldiers were supposed to be married to their duties. Then there was Valentine of Terni, who was locked up back before Rome was converted to Christianity for being a bishop before it was cool. He then healed his jailer’s daughter of her lifelong blindness, which is a pretty neat trick, and the whole household and all their slaves gave it up to Jesus. The third was Valentine of Passau, whose corpus vitae basically includes not being convincing enough to convert anybody. Instead, his would-be parishioners threw rocks at him until he went away and built himself a little chapel in the Alps and converted random mountain folk until he died. Which one is the Saint Valentine we know and love depends entirely on who you ask.
Regardless of the general confusion that surrounds who the day is actually for, Saint Valentine’s Day was now a thing, and it’s been mostly bouquets of roses and heart-shaped boxes of chocolate from there. That is, except for a few brief and shining examples of how the thirst for violence in our flawed and craven little souls can be quelled but never fully quenched, and the black cloud of tragedy that hangs over our fragile lives will never be dispelled.
Let’s discuss:
The Valentine’s Day Massacre has been a title attributed to a few episodes of unpleasantness throughout our long and sordid history, but here we will address the one in Chicago, because it has Tommy guns and prohibition and gangsters and other stuff that’s interesting without being as horrendous as some of the other events with that title, which you may look into on your own. You’ll recall that in the USA in the 1920s, the temperance movement was in full swing, which meant booze was contraband, and there was money to be had for those with connections to get the goods. Now, this was a lucrative business, and one that dear old Al Capone was, ahem, making a killing at. However, not content to sit idly by, upstart mobster Bugs Moran (so called for his propensity to bug out, be volatile), decided to take a piece of the pie for himself. He started his own bootlegging outfit right there in Chicago. This did not sit well with Capone, to put it mildly, so one fine evening, Capone sent some guys dressed as coppers to go deal with the problem. They lined up the seven men present and emptied 70 rounds into them. Bugs himself was late to the party and got away, dying sometime later in prison, while Capone would live to get old and rich, dying much later at his home in Florida from syphilis in his brain.
Teddy Roosevelt’s Valentine’s Day in 1884 was not a happy one at all, although it had begun well enough. His wife Alice Lee had given birth two days earlier to a daughter, their first child, also named Alice because old-timey people loved that kind of thing, and he was blissfully content as he trundled off to work at the New York Legislature. Around midday, he was suddenly summoned home by a messenger, and, fearing that something horrible had happened to the baby, he rushed back. Upon arriving, he learned that his mother, who lived with them and was inexplicably named “Mittie,” had died quite suddenly of typhoid fever. He had just made his way downstairs to process this sudden and tragic loss with his wife, when she too up and died. She had been suffering from undiagnosed Bright’s Disease, a form of kidney failure, and doctors had thought the signs were just a peculiar side effect of her pregnancy (doctors in those days were basically just guessing anytime they said anything was anything). The entry in Roosevelt’s diary from that day is marked with a black X and says only, “The light has gone out of my life.” He would retreat into nature and solitude before returning and eventually becoming president, but it was this time in nature that prompted him to protect huge swathes of the American backwoods as national parks.
The Valentine’s Day accidental bombing of Prague was a pretty major whoopsie-daisies. Due to errors involving the navigational equipment on United States Air Force bombers during the spring of 1945, the radars went SNAFU during a mission to bomb the German stronghold of Dresden. The Allied Forces, however, just got all muddled up and headed straight for Prague, the Czechoslovakian city known for really cool astronomical clocks and giant gothic castles. The cities of Prague and Dresden are over 100 kilometres apart. Shortly after high noon, while Praguers were presumably smooching and trading cards and chocolate on a Baroque bridge, 62 B-17 Flying Fortress bombers flew in by mistake, dropped 152 tons of bombs onto the unsuspecting citizenry, and headed for home. The death toll came to 701 people, hundreds of historical landmarks were destroyed, and 11,000 people were left homeless. A horrible and avoidable travesty of war.
The vinegar valentines, on a much lighter note, was a neat little endeavour undertaken by those lovable freaks of Victorian England. You see, when the monarchy are basically the only celebrities to idolize, and the freshly widowed Queen Victoria goes into a lifetime of mourning, the whole country tends to get a bit weird and fun. Long, black mourning dresses became the chicest fashion; photography, still in its infancy, was used to take pictures of your dead relatives; people started gathering in parlours to bother the spirits of the dearly departed; and love was out, while loathing was so in. So-called Vinegar Valentines, named for the sour taste they left in the mouth of the receiver (not to mention the bitterness of the sender’s heart), were sent anonymously and had unflattering caricatures of their intended victim splashed across them in vivid colours. The words would be ones of insult and ridicule along the lines of “You’re a nasty old cat, and a great deal of things far worse than that!” which was vicious slander in those days.
The world is awash with ways to show your intended that you love them. In Iraq, the Kurds decorate red apples with cloves and give them as gifts. In Germany, they bake big gingerbread cookies in the shape of hearts with messages of adoration iced onto them. In Denmark, you may receive an intricately snipped piece of paper, called a gaekkebrev, that has a fun little ditty written on it and is signed with a cryptic sequence of dots, and if you can guess who sent it to you, you are awarded an egg that’s all dolled up in its Easter colours. Much less cryptic, but a definite timesaver, South Africans simply pin on their sleeve a piece of paper with the name of the person they’d like to take home scrawled on it. The French had a tradition where women gathered at a bonfire to get drunk and hurl obscenities at the night sky about any potential lover who had pissed them off, but it got so popular and unruly that the French government outlawed the whole scene.
So, whether you are smitten with your one and only, or intending to send a few Vinegar Valentines of your own, just remember that the day is so much more than you might suppose. It was, in fact, the prolific 14th century poet Geoffrey Chaucer who first tied the day in with romance when he wrote the lines “For this was on Saint Valentine’s Day; When every fowl comes there to take his mate” in his much-loved poem “Parliament of Fowls.”
Another century would pass before the first Saint Valentine’s Day card would be sent, although once again, the annals of history are not quite sure by whom. One story is that the Duke of Orleans, imprisoned at the impregnable Tower of London, sent it to his wife, referring to her as “my very gentle valentine,” although she would be dead before it was ever delivered.
The other story is that the very first valentine’s card was sent by a trailblazer named Margery Brews, who was secretly in love with someone that her family found inadequate and sent him a love letter in which she calls him “My right-well beloved Valentine.” The British Library, which has no flair for the dramatic, says this is the true story. The other story, which said Library has declared apocryphal at best, is clearly a much better yarn.
It wasn’t until two centuries later that Shakespeare wrote about melancholic Ophelia going to Hamlet’s window and singing “Tomorrow is Saint Valentine’s Day; All in the morning betime; And I, a maid at your window; To be your Valentine” that we started referring to your chosen mate as “your Valentine” in regular parlance.
Eventually, we made our way to the gaudy, money-grubbing, performative spectacle as we know and love today, with a lady named Esther Howland, from Massachusetts. Much like Bugs Moran, she realized there was money to be had and started scheming. She started mass-producing Saint Valentine’s Day cards. This was in 1848, and she would begin raking in the big bucks almost immediately. She would carry on happily exploiting the ideals of love until she died a very rich woman in 1904. In 1910, after six years of no valentines to be had whatsoever, a man named Joyce Hall from Missouri started a little company called Hallmark, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Oh, and in 1969, the Catholic Church decided, since nobody knew who he really was, and he was promoting fraternization, that Valentine could still be a technical saint but removed him from all the liturgies. Canonization and beatification are much like Hotel California in that way; you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.
So, in the end, the day may not even really exist at all, but Happy Valentine’s Day, nevertheless.