Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Valentine's Day

Episode Date: February 13, 2021

Every February 14, people around the world celebrate Valentine’s Day. It is a day for everything heart-shaped, flowers, flowers, candy, and romance. Why is this day the day dedicated to romance? What’s with the hearts? And who or what is a valentine? Is this all a giant conspiracy of greeting card manufacturers? Learn more about Saint Valentine’s Day on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Every February 14th, people around the world celebrate Valentine's Day. It's a day for everything heart-shaped, flowers, jewelry, candy, and romance. But why is this day dedicated to romance? And what's the deal with hearts? And who or what is a Valentine? Is this all a giant conspiracy of greeting card manufacturers? Learn more about St. Valentine's Day on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong?

throughline is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. This episode is sponsored by Scotty Vest. Let's say you're going to meet someone special and you have a surprise for them. You don't want to give away the surprise by carrying around a box so you want to keep it a secret. I suggest meeting your special someone wearing some Scotty vest gear.

They have enough pockets to hide a greeting card, a box for jewelry, boxes of candy, and even a bouquet of flowers if you're wearing the right jacket. You can get 15% off your next order by going to scotty vest.com and using coupon code, everything everywhere, all one word, at checkout. Valentine's Day, which is an extremely secular holiday today, actually has its roots as the Christian Feast Day of St. Valentine. Who then is St. Valentine? Valentine was an early Christian who lived in Rome. As with many saints from the period, there isn't a whole lot that's known about him. In fact, there may have been more than one St. Valentine from the early Christian church. St. Valentine of Rome is believed to have been martyred in the year 269 under the Emperor Claudius II. St. Valentine of Turney was a bishop who was martyred in the year 273 under the Emperor Orreelian. A third St. Valentine may have been a bishop who was martyred in the year 273 under the Emperor Aurellian.

A third St. Valentine may have been martyred in the Roman province of Africa around this time, although nothing else is known about this person beyond their name. It should be noted that historians aren't even sure of Valentine of Rome and Valentine of Turney were in fact separate people. On one hand, they were very close in time and location to each other, so they easily might have been the same person. On the other hand, Valentine was a pretty common name in the late imperial period, so it's very possible that they may have been different people. speaking of which, the name Valentine comes from the name Valens, which was a popular Roman name.

In addition to the three possible saints I just mentioned, there are eight more saints who share the name Valentine who aren't lumped together with this group that live centuries later. There was also a Pope Valentine, who was Pope for all of two months in the year 827, and there is a female Saint Valentinia. The feast of St. Valentine was established under Pope Glazius I in the year 496, and it was intended to honor the St. Valentine of Rome. St. Valentine is also the patron saint of beekeepers, as well as those who faint, have epilepsy, or the plague. Things to keep in mind to put in your Valentine's Day card for next year.

So, okay, Valentine's Day was originally a feast day for a saint of the same name. What does all of this have to do with romance? Some modern researchers have tried to link the feast of St. Valentine to the Roman festival Alupacalia, which was celebrated from February 13th to the 15th. Lupercolia was a pretty wild celebration that involved sacrificing goats and then taking the skins of the goats and running around naked with the skins hitting people with them. It was believed that if you were struck with the goat skins, it would improve your fertility. So many women would line up to get struck with the goat skins on their hands on purpose. Fertility was as close as Lupercalia got to romance or love.

While there were many pagan holidays that Christians tried to co-opt, Lupercalia seems to be one of them that they just tried to get rid of. So again, where does the whole romance thing come in? The earliest known association of the Feast of St. Valentine to Romance was in a poem by Jeffrey Chaucer titled Parliament of Fowles from 1382. The relevant passage in the poem translated to modern English is as follows. Quote, For this was on St. Valentine's Day, when every bird comes there to choose his match,

of every kind that men may think of, and that so huge a noise they began to make, that the earth and air and tree and every lake was so full that not easily was there space for me to stand, so full was all the place." The reference in the poem to St. Valentine's Day being the day which birds would start mating, which, under the old Julian calendar, would be on February 23rd. No one is even sure if Chaucer was referring to the February St. Valentine's Day. The link to the saint himself and the idea of love had to do with St. Valentine's

supposedly performing secret marriages between Christians when they weren't allowed to marry under Emperor Claudius II. It isn't known how accurate these stories are because they first appeared centuries after Valentine's death. While Chaucer's work referencing Valentine's Day and Love was the first such mention, there were others soon after indicating that the tradition was already widespread or grew rapidly. In the year 1400, King Charles VI, the France, issued the Charter of the Court of Love, which was a festival that took place on February 14, and revolved around love. More and more references began appearing starting in the 15th century, and February 14th

had clearly been associated with love and romance by this time. The tradition of giving valentines, that being cards made of paper, began with people writing love letters to each other for St. Valentine's Day. Valentine's Day got more popular over time. It even managed a mention in Shakespeare's Hamlet. Quote, Tomorrow is St. Valentine's Day, all in the morning bedtime, and I am made at your window, be your Valentine. Then up he rose and dawned his clothes and duped the chamber door,

let in the maid that out a maid never departed more. Hamlet, Act 4, Scene 5. The origin of the Roses Are Red, Violets Are Blue Rhyme, dates back to Edmund Spencer's poem, The Fairy Queen, from 1590. He wrote, quote, She bathed with roses red and violets blue, and all the sweetest flowers that in the forest grew, unquote. The modern version of this came from an 18th century, nursery rhyme, which was, quote, The roses red, the violet's blue, the honey sweet, and so are you. Thou art my love, and I am thine. I drew to thee, my Valentine.

The lot was cast, and then I drew, and fortune said it should be you. Unquote. All of this was still a very far cry from the Valentine's Day that we know today. Our modern Valentine's Day began, as so many modern things did in the 19th century. The popularity of creating cards exploded in England. In 1835, for example, there were 60,000 Valentine card sent. When British postal rates dropped in 1840, there was a dramatic increase in card sending, with over 400 card sent in 1840. With the lower postal rates, there was also an explosion in pre-made Valentine's Day cards being printed.

The pre-made cards eventually all but supplanted the handwritten Valentine letters. The Valentine trend was also happening on the other side of the Atlantic. American Esther Howland sold the first mass-produced valentines in the United States, which became the basis of the entire modern greeting card industry. Howland's first cards were made by teams of women and consisted of lace, ribbon, as well as cardboard stock. Today, the greeting card association, yes, there is an actual trade association for greeting cards, gives out the annual Esther Howland Award for greeting card visionary. According to the aforementioned greeting card association, over 190 million valentines

are sent out each year in just the United States. The tradition of giving out candy developed in 1868, when the Cadbury Company created a heart-shaped box of chocolates for Valentine's Day. The company's founder, John Cadbury, was a devote Quaker who wanted to encourage an alternative other than alcohol. In Japan, the tradition is for women to buy chocolates for men. This actually dates to a misprinted newspaper advertisement from 1936, which accidentally told women to buy them for men other than the other way around.

One of the unique Valentine Day candies are called Conversation Hearts. Those are those little candies with short sayings on them such as Be Mine or Only You. They originally got their start as a lozenge before the machines were converted to candy to make neco-waferes. The first heart-shaped candies were made in 2001 and were much bigger than today. As such, they had more room for text with sayings like, How long shall I have to wait, please be considerate. That would never fit on one of the candies today. The tradition of roses goes way back.

The ancient Greeks associated red roses with the goddess Aphrodite, the goddess of love. The tradition of giving roses took off in the 19th century, as commercial flower growing and delivery became a thing. Currently, there are a quarter billion roses grown and sold every year for Valentine's Day, with roses representing 70% of all flowers sold. Flowers make up an estimated 36% of all money spent on Valentine's Day. Today, over $20 billion is spent on Valentine's Day just in the United States, and 75% of all the money is spent by men. So if you're wondering if the entire holiday is just a made-up thing by the greeting card and candy companies, there's one fact that you should know. Valentine's Day is not an official holiday in any country in the world.

In fact, since 1969, St. Valentine's Day isn't even on the calendar anymore for the Catholic Church. So if you really want to take your Valentine for the ultimate St. Valentine's Day experience, I recommend taking them to the Basilica de Santa Maria in Rome, where you can see on display the exhumed skull of the original St. Valentine. Executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is James McAula. The associate producer is Thor Thompson. Remember to leave a five-star review to get your review read on the show. They can be left at Apple Podcasts, Podcast, or wherever you listen to the show.

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