Originally published in Synapse on February 11, 1999.
Ever since New Year’s Day, it seems the world has been swathed in sickly shades of red and pink and filled with declarations of “I love you” and “Be mine.” A walk through Safeway or even the UCSF bookstores makes it painfully obvious that that holiday is upon us yet again.
Valentine’s Day strikes me as one of the strangest holidays imaginable — next to perhaps Guy Fawkes’ Day, when folks in England burn a famous traitor in effigy. Someone somewhere decided that we needed a specific day for love, and voila, Valentine’s Day was born.
Miraculously, unlike National Health Information Management Week (beginning November 1) or National Medical Assistants’ Day (October 20), the international day for love has managed to become a commercial success.
From roses to chocolates to romantic dinners, we’ve been provided a formula for expressing love: The florist and Hallmark will help you say things you never would have dreamed of ever saying yourself. From roses to chocolates to romantic dinners, we’ve been provided a formula for expressing love.
I never seem able to greet February 14 with anything besides a groan or a sneer. I’ve spent many a Valentine’s Day single and a few actually romantically entangled, and to be honest, I’m not sure which is worse. Certainly, as a single woman, I did yearn to have someone for whom I could purchase red boxer shorts with “xoxo” scrawled all over them.
But being part of a couple is no better: Valentine’s Day resoundingly brings I home the gap between idealized representations of romance and real-life love and relationships.
The dressed-to-kill couple reclining to soft music, sipping champagne, and savoring strawberries dipped in chocolate may be the merchandisers’ idea of bliss, but I’d much prefer ordering in a pizza and watching a movie curled up in sweatpants and silly bunny slippers.
Unfortunately, however, history, tradition, and, of course, advertising all conspire against me.
Origins
There was, in fact, a Saint Valentine; actually, at least three different Saint Valentines are recorded as Catholic martyrs under the date of February 14, a Catholic feast day until 1969.
One Valentine was martyred by the Roman Emperor Claudius 11, beaten and beheaded for refusing to recant his Christian beliefs. Some accounts have it that his transgression was marrying young couples, although Claudius forbade it.
Apparently, Claudius believed single men made for better soldiers. Blood and gore seem a strange source for a day of wine and roses. Valentine’s Day’s romantic connotations derive from two other sources.
The ancient Romans celebrated Lupercalia, a fertility festival honoring the pastoral god Lupercus, on Feb. 15. As with several other pagan festivals, Lupercalia was subsumed by the Church and Christianized into Saint Valentine’s Day.
During the Middle Ages, conventional wisdom in England and France held that love birds began to mate on February 14. Chaucer’s Parliament of Foules mentions, “For this was sent on Seynt Valentyne’s day / Whan every foul cometh ther to choose his mate.”
Miraculously, a gruesome execution, pagan festivities, and avian intercourse have metamorphosed into a celebration of romance. The exchanging of gifts and letters between lovers on Valentine’s Day is alluded to by fourteenth and fifteenth century French and English literature.
The use of “Valentine” to refer to a loved one also dates from that period, and the oldest known Valentine is a 15th-century woodcut showing a knight receiving flowers from a lady.
Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene contains perhaps the predecessor to the well-known “Roses are red, violets are blue” poem: “Roses red and violets blew / And all the sweetest flowers that in the forest grew.”
This year, over a billion Valentine’s cards are expected to be delivered. Hallmark alone makes 1,800 different kinds. In the card arena, commercial interests have propagated an entire schema of guilt and monetary penance. As a child, I exchanged cards with classmates, but my teachers always required us to bring cards for everyone or no one at all.
Despite this effort at equality, one’s true attitude toward you could be easily assessed by whether you got one of those accordion pack cards with tell-tale perforated borders or the large scratch and sniff cards with perhaps a roll of Smarties to boot.
Add the billion cards to 60-70 million roses and untold dollars spent on gifts and romantic dinners, and you get a sense of what an enormous industry Saint Valentine’s martyrdom has engendered.
For those of you out there who actually look forward to Valentine’s Day, by all means, enjoy yourselves this Saturday. As for me, I’m planning to wear black, eat chocolate, and maybe watch the Lakers vs. the Pacers.
