Dinner tables are set.. flowers are being purchased from any place that still has then. Even those remains of dried and wilted roses at the local convenient store..
Anything will do for last minute Valentine’s Day purchasers! The pressure is on. Love is in the air. Even if you forgot to smell it!
The Valentine’s Day decorations went it just a short time before Christmas day. We all saw the little heart shaped chocolates and balloons slowly taking over aisles at Rite Aid and your local neighborhood super store. Some enjoy the scenery. The sappy lovey-dovey kind of scenery. Others dread it, either because they are alone in the world or just callous to the long held over-corporatization of a holiday about “love.”
So before you order the steak and lobster and spend ridiculously higher prices at a restaurant than a normal night, consider the source of the holiday.. Let’s take a deep dive back and ponder the beginnings.. And come to grips with the meaning for the expensive season. This will be something to talk about over a candlelit dinner!
The wild Romans and the Cupid they gave us!
Imagine the scene: A naked herd of people dancing while active sacrifices of animals takes place.
There are smiles and cheers, and hopes that the burning animal flesh will convince the gods to give the dancing nudes fertility.
All the while, men draw names of women from jars and, for the duration of a great festival, be ‘coupled’ with lucky, or unlucky, names they pull by chance.
Welcome to Lupercalia! The ancient Roman celebration.. For two days, about February 13 to 15h, Roman men sacrificed goats and dogs, then whipped women with the hides of the animals they had just slain. Apparently, tradition held that two high-born young men stripped naked and sacrificed a dog and a goat. They smeared blood on their foreheads, then wiped it off with wool dipped in milk.
The blood and sacrifices would make the men fertile.. they would spread their seed during Lupercalia.
These symbolic blood rituals and sexual celebrations are at the root of Valentine’s Day.. But how did the name change?
Simple!
THEY WILL KNOW WE ARE CHRISTIANS BY OUR LOVE BY OUR LOVE!
Emperor Claudius II executed two men — both named Valentine — on Feb. 14 of different years in the 3rd century A.D.
Their martyrdom was honored by the Catholic Church with the celebration of St. Valentine’s Day.
A little back story on Claudius.. Claudius believed that Roman men were unwilling to join the army because of their strong attachment to their wives and families. So his solution involved banning all marriages and engagements in Rome!
A priest named Valentine continued to perform the rite of marriage in Rome in defiance.
Valentine was arrested and was condemned to be beaten to death with clubs and to have his head cut off. The sentence was carried out on February 14, on or about the year 270.. Legend also has it that while in jail, St. Valentine left a farewell note for the jailer’s daughter, who had become his friend, and signed it “From Your Valentine.” And he was named a saint after his demise.
Pagan rituals ignited so many holidays because the Church addressed them by combining them with religious ceremonies. No difference on Valentine’s Day.
In the 5th century, Pope Gelasius I by combined St. Valentine’s Day with Lupercalia to expel the pagan rituals..
And…
THE RITUALS STAYED, KIND OF.
We don’t spread blood on our heads.. we don’t sacrifice animals (though we eat them) and we don’t whip women with their hides (I don’t think!?) anymore.. but the symbolic nature of Lupercalia seemingly has stayed. Minus the blood, the love stuck around.
The massacre
Valentine’s Day is associated with love.. but other events occurred on St. Valentine’s feast of Lupercalia Goat blood..
The Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre was the 1929 murder of seven members and associates of Chicago’s North Side Gang that occurred on Saint Valentine’s Day.
The men were gathered at a Lincoln Park garage on the morning of that feast day, February 14th. They were lined up against a wall and shot by four unknown assailants who were dressed like police officers. The incident resulted from the struggle to control organized crime in the city during Prohibition between the Irish North Siders, headed by George “Bugs” Moran, and their Italian South Side Gang rivals led by Al Capone. The perpetrators have never been conclusively identified, but former members of the Egan’s Rats gang working for Capone are suspected of a role, as are members of the Chicago Police Department who allegedly wanted revenge for the killing of a police officer’s son.
THE ICE STORM COMETH
Another notable Valentine’s Day moment when an ice storm hit Pennsylvania, causing huge pileups and highway shutdowns.. At that time Governor Ed Rendell’s defense was to say he didn’t realize the problem since it was raining in Philly!
HOW HISTORY VIEWED IT
It is fascinating to think that modern society has lost its knowledge about Valentine’s Day..
But yet in 1888, that’s right, 1888, front page headlines talked about how the holiday originated.
The Scranton REPUBLICAN front page described the historical events of Lupercalia and Valentine’s Day on February 15, 1888.
The Lancaster EXAMINER reported on February 20, 1889 that mail carriers groaned under the heavy load of mail because of an increasingly popular “valentines'” tradition..
In 1904, a columnist had a sour view of Valentine’s Day and hoped it would only be for those sending valentines to friends..
The holiday continued changing through the years.. and more and more corporatization took place as decades rolledon.
By 1952 all bets were off. The people who wanted the holiday banned were slowly dying off. And when you see an ad for nylons in the Pottsville Republican a week before Valentine’s Day, you know they lost the war.
And the rest… was history.
