What You Don't Know About Valentine's Day

Valentine's Day, also called Saint Valentine’s Day or the Feast of Saint Valentine is the most wonderful holiday ever. It usually starts on February 14th. However the actual origins of the holiday were not as innocent as it is today.

It started way back in the Roman times where they celebrated the feast of Lupercalia, it was brutal everyone killed goats and dogs and Noel Lenski, a historian at the University of Colorado says “The Roman romantics were drunk and naked”. Young women were also beaten by men because they believed it would make them fertile. There was also a matchmaking lottery where a man would pick out a woman’s name from a jar and whoever had that name had to marry the man for the duration of the festival and even the rest of their lives if the match was perfect. After the Romans version of Valentine's Day it turned into a Christian Feast Day in A.D 496 when Pope Gelasius 1 commemorated a martyred saint, Valentine and in the third century, the Roman emperor Claudius 2 executed two men named Valentine on Feb. 14th. Then Valentine’s Day was depicted by Geoffrey Chaucer with literal love birds by writing a poem called “The Parliament of Fowls”, William Shakespeare when he wrote star-crossed lover romance stories such as “A Midsummer Night's Dream” and “Romeo and Juliet” and the Aztecs who symbolized chocolate as an aphrodisiac. Similar to Thanksgiving you can also throw a delicious feast for your guests and serve chocolate for dessert or you can buy gifts and write love cards for someone who desires them the most or if a close friend or relative has a birthday on that date you can travel to a warmer continent over the winter break. Overall Valentine’s Day is supposed to be a holiday about showing the spirit of love and kindness to those whom we are closest to and even our enemies, acquaintances or even complete strangers.