STORY:
Roman's First to Celebrate Pleasure

The history of Valentine's Day, part one:

The Roman holiday February 15th (about halfway between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox) was the beginning of the annual fertility festival in Rome. Besides celebrating the renewal of plant and animal life, it was, as Mani Niall puts it, "A celebration of sensual pleasure, a time to meet and court a prospective mate." Several gods and goddesses were honored during the festival including Lupercus, the god of shepherds, and Juno, the goddess of women and marriage.

But it wasn't a purely sexually-oriented event. As the Valentines Forever site notes, "In ancient Rome, the lives of young boys and young girls were strictly separate. However, during the Lupercalia Festival, the boys would each pick a girl's name from a vase. The boys then became partners for the duration of the festival with the girl that they chose. During the festival, the pairs of children danced and played together. Sometimes the pairing of the children lasted an entire year, and often, they would fall in love and would later marry."

When Christianity became Rome's official religion, the new authorities moved to ban or transform all the old rites.In AD 496, Pope Gelasius officially replaced the pagan festival with one deemed morally suitable. He needed a "lover's" saint to replace the pagan deity Lupercus. The new festival was named in honor of a martyred bishop, one of several men named Valentine who had already been named as saints. The new holiday was supposed to downplay sexual themes in favor of honoring religious devotion and familial love.But the boy-meets-girl aspect of the day never went away. Boys continued to draw girls' names from a box, and the resulting pairs would be chaste but special friends for the next year. Eventually, girls also got to draw boys' names.

By the late Middle Ages, as elaborate rituals of "courtly love" became popular among Europe's nobility, Valentine's Day evolved into the now-familiar routine of public parties and personal gifts (including cards and flowers).The English poets Geoffrey Chaucer and John Donne proclaimed it to be the natural day to honor true love, because they believed it to be the day when doves and other birds chose their lifetime mates.By the Victorian era in the late 19th Century, mass-produced Valentine's Day cards and commercially-grown flowers had become the holiday's principal symbols.

In 1969, St. Valentine's Day was one of several holidays removed from the official Catholic calendar. But that hasn't stopped people from celebrating the day of love on February 14.