Long history of Valentine’s Day explained by student
Valentine’s Day all started with a story about two young boys who were raised by a wolf and then started a city, said Patti Lambert, sophomore in anthropology.
“Valentine’s Day has a huge, long history through time,” Lambert said.
Lambert gave a presentation as part of an ongoing series of lectures given through the museum of anthropology.
The Roman holiday, Lupercalia, celebrated the wolf that found Romus and Remulus and raised them, Lambert said. According to the legend, Romus and Remulus went on to found one of the greatest empires ever, the Roman Empire, she said. It was a holiday based on animal sacrifices and fertility celebrated by the early Romans, she said.
“The women would put their names in a box and the men would draw out a name in hopes of finding love that year,” Lambert said.
However, in 1494, Pope Gelasius changed the holiday to worship the Virgin Mary’s purification in the temple after giving birth to Jesus, Lambert said. They made the changes to try and make subtle, rather than drastic changes in the local culture and traditions, she said.
Later, the holiday was named after Saint Valentine, who was killed for marrying soldiers when it was illegal for a soldier to be married, Lambert said. Valentine was considered to be a martyr, she said.
“Instead of pulling the names of women from the box, the tradition changed and the names of saints were drawn from the box instead,” she said.
Some believe that the tradition of pulling these cards led to the Valentine’s Day tradition of giving out cards, Lambert said.
A woman named Esther Howland was involved in a family business in 1830 that imported stationary and cards from Europe when she decided to start her own set of cards and Valentine’s Day stationary, Lambert said.
“She is a very important lady that most people don’t know about,” said Lambert. “She became the most successful female entrepreneur in the United States. She founded what later came to be the Hallmark Company.”
Some of the symbols that are still used today for Valentine’s Day have ancient roots, Lambert said. The heart symbolizes emotion and even had roots in the Bible, she said, and red can be traced to the blood from the original Roman ceremony. Cupid’s arrows can symbolize the pangs of love that people can get, she said, while Cupid himself was a minor god who symbolizes passionate love. The roses represent love knots, family lineage and can be used as a great source of vitamin C, she said.
The holiday has evolved differently around the world, yet the Americanized traditions are starting to take root in recent years, said Piotr Kokoszka, Poland native and statistics teacher at Utah State.
“The modern style of Valentine’s Day came from the United States,” Kokoszka said. “I’ve just noticed a change in the past 20 years, and now it’s exactly the same as it is here.”
When people go to the store and buy Valentine’s cards or other stationary, they don’t often realize the history behind it or the holiday in general, Lambert said.
–seth.bracken@aggiemail.usu.edu