Holiday of Emotion or Promotion?

Tradition, commerce both play role in story of St. Valentine’s Day

Today is Valentine’s Day, the day when sweethearts offer tokens of love to one another.

The holiday has a long tradition. It is named for not one, but two — maybe three — Christian martyrs named Valentine.

Saint Valentine of Temi was a bishop who was supposedly killed during the persecution of Emperor Aurelian. Saint Valentine of Rome was a priest who died for the faith in the year 269.

The Roman Catholic Church has another Valentine who was martyred in Africa, but nothing more is known of him.

The church declared Feb. 14 St. Valentine’s Day around the year 498, mainly as part of an effort to Christianize a pagan fertility holiday celebrated during that time..

It was the writer Geoffrey Chaucer who first associated Valentine’s Day with love, in a passage in the 1382 poem “Parlement of Foules” written to honor the betrothal of King Richard II and Anne of Bohemia.

The Valentine’s Day that Chaucer referred to, though, was a day commemorating yet another Valentine, a former bishop of Genoa, whose feast fell on May 2, the same day the marriage treaty for the royal couple was signed.

Over the years, though, it was the Feb. 14 Valentine’s Day date that became enshrined as the day for lovers.

The tradition of sending cards on Valentine’s Day apparently began in England with little handwritten notes and cards, but took off in America in 1847 when Esther Howland of Worcester, Mass., designed the first mass-produced cards for her father’s stationary shop. It was the birth of the modern greeting card industry and now about one billion Valentine’s Day cards are sent each year,

Since then other businesses have gotten into the act. Candy, flowers and jewelry are all now closely associated with the holiday, as are romantic dinners or getaways.

Some may scoff at Valentine’s Day, saying the holiday is more about money these days than romance. And there is truth to that.

But, like any holiday, it is what one makes of it. The day will have all the feeling you decide to put into it.

So may you and your loved one have a happy Valentine’s Day.