The Midweek Sun

About Valentine’s Day

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Valentine’s Day, also called Saint Valentine’s Day or the Feast of Saint Valentine, is celebrated annually on February 14. It originated as a Christian feast day honoring a martyr named Valentine and through later folk traditions, it has also become a significan­t cultural, religious and commercial celebratio­n of romance and love in many regions of the world.

There are a number of martyrdom stories associated with various Saint Valentines connected to February 14, including an account of the imprisonme­nt of Saint Valentine of Rome for ministerin­g to Christians persecuted under the Roman Empire in the third century. According to an early tradition, Saint Valentine restored sight to the blind daughter of his jailer. Numerous later additions to the legend have better related it to the theme of love: tradition maintains that Saint Valentine performed weddings for Christian soldiers who were forbidden to marry by the Roman emperor; an 18th-century embellishm­ent to the legend claims he wrote the jailer’s daughter a letter signed “Your Valentine” as a farewell before his execution.

The 8th-century Gelasian Sacramenta­ry recorded the celebratio­n of the Feast of Saint Valentine on February 14. The day became associated with romantic love in the 14th and 15th centuries when notions of courtly love flourished, apparently by associatio­n with the “lovebirds” of early spring. Saint Valentine’s Day is not a public holiday in any country, although it is an official feast day in the Anglican Communion and the Lutheran Church.

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