Valentine’s Day musings
With Valentine’s Day falling on Sunday, nothing really changes. Valentine’s is not a national holiday, but it is one of unfeigned importance with societies across the world, especially the United States.
What I like is that it is a fun day for kids who draw the most compelling Valentine’s cards with hearts, arrows and misspelled messages that warm the heart and make your day.
While I am an enduring fan of Hallmark, the greeting card colossus, their handiwork is upstaged by what kids bring home from school. New images and halfrhyming messages for the refrigerator. Ah, refrigerator art — the greatest art. Van Gogh, Monet, Renoir — all the vintage geniuses with their stunning strokes and palettes — might bring about awe, but they don’t melt you heart like a grade school innocent.
Valentine’s Day is for lovers across the world. I can remember that if you could afford a box of chocolates for a girl you were sweet on at Valentine’s, you were the leader in the clubhouse. Americans spend $27 billion dollars on Valentine’s gifts each year. More than $1.8 billion dollars is allocated for buying candy for that special someone.
Celebrating Valentine’s Day dates back to Roman times and is a happy time for ‘most everybody. In pagan times, Valentine’s Day was associated with a fertility festival. This was long before Viagra, but there was something, less than romantic, that took place to enhance fertility, which was to smack women with hides. All I can say about that … is that we have come a long way since that time.
Valentine’s Day is a day to remember good things and high times, but history reminds us that this day has been associated with dastardly pogroms in the past, including the Strasbourg massacre when hundreds of Jews were burned to death.
The Allies laid to waste the city of Dresden, Germany, on Valentine’s Day, 1945. It was Valentine’s Day 1989 when Ayatollah Khomeini decreed that author Salman Rushdie should be murdered for his book “Satanic Verses.”
Anybody familiar with the history of organized crime will recall the St. Valentine’s
Day massacre in Chicago in 1929, when gangsters dressed as police officers lined up seven rival gangsters in a garage and gunned them to death. Al Capone immediately became a suspect. Surprise, surprise. Capone is said to have been directly or indirectly responsible for 300 to 700 murders. He was never convicted of murder, however, but the government got him for income tax evasion.
There was good news on Valentine’s Day, 1912, when Arizona officially became the 48th state. President William Howard Taft, whose weight has been pegged at 340 pounds (he is famous for getting stuck in a hotel bathtub), “signed our 48th state into existence.”
Valentine’s Day became official as far back as the 5th century when Pope Gelasius proclaimed Feb. 14 as “St. Valentine’s Day.” It was not until the Middle Ages, however, that this holiday became associated with love and romance. This came about because it was a common belief that birds started their mating season on Feb. 14.
The following “Six Little Stories with Lots of Meanings” has been making the rounds on the Internet for some time, but worthy of an encore and most appropriate during the card giving season:
“Once all villagers decided to pray for rain. On the day of prayer, all the people gathered, but one little boy came with an umbrella. That is Faith.
“When you throw babies in the air, they laugh because they know you will catch them. That is Trust.
“Every night we go to bed without any assurance of being alive the next morning, but we set the alarm to wake up. That is Hope.
“We plan big things tomorrow in spite of zero knowledge of the future. That is Confidence.
“We see the world suffering, but still, we get married and have children. That is Love.
“On a man’s shirt there was this message. I am not 80 years old. I am 16 with 64 years of experience. That is Attitude.”
Selah!