What to know about Valentine's Day origins: A tame holiday with a wild past
All roads lead to Rome, and that's especially true for Valentine's Day.
A USA Today story outlines how the Roman fertility festival of Lupercalia is a likely origin of the holiday. The Romans built an empire on "romanizing" local gods and festivals as their influence spread.
When the emperor converted to Christianity, many of the holidays common to Roman society received a makeover.
A prisoner named "Valentine" was said in one tale to have written a note signed "from your Valentine" to his jailer's daughter, according to the Feb. 13, 2024, article.
The martyr's signature of "your Valentine" — at least in the anglicized version of the story — inspired successive generations of lovelorn hopefuls to plead their own cases to the objects of their affection.
Lupercalia was too wild for Pope Gelasius I. The festival celebrated spring with fertility rites, including a lottery pairing women with men.
So according to Britannica.com, the pontiff replaced outlawed Lupercalia and is said to have replaced it with St. Valentine's Day at the end of the fifth century, and to be celebrated on Feb. 14.
Officially known as St. Valentine of Rome, the third-century Roman saint is traditionally commonly associated with "courtly love," according to Catholic Online. Not much is known about the man, and there is a real possibility that there were two St. Valentines. Because of that dearth of knowledge, in 1969 he was removed from the Roman Catholic Calendar though the church still recognizes him as a saint.
According to History.com, exchanging Valentine's took off in the 1700s, a period coinciding with Romanticism in literature and art across Europe and America. When a woman named Esther A. Howland began selling the first mass-produced valentines in the 1840s, an industry was born.
In the modern era, the holiday has come to represent expressions of love not only between lovers, but friends, family members and even coworkers.
This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Why was Valentine's Day created? What to know about holidays origins
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