Below is an article I wrote on the history of Valentine's day for the February 2014 Sturbridge Times Magazine, see page 14.
In this country,
there are unofficial holidays we enjoy that are fun, but other than the names,
the ancient roots are obscure. Oh, we may know Saint Patrick’s was a holy
man, but his sanctity is rarely celebrated on March 17. Halloween was the
pagan New Year that Christianity took over to observe deceased saints, though
one would hardly know it these days.
So it is with the 14th of this month. As children, we learn about it in
elementary school as notes are given and received. Candy is a big part,
especially those little hearts with messages like “be mine.” As we grow
up, a young swain forgets the day at his peril. One should not begrudge
the florist or restaurant owner his or her living, let alone the employees, but
why does all this happen?
It goes way back,
really way back. We know of the Roman fertility festival called the
Lupercalia. Undoubtedly, the celebration long predated the Latins, but
they enjoyed it with gusto. From the 13th to the 15th of February young
men would whip young women with the flesh of sacrificed goats. At the end
there would be a lottery to pair up the boys and girls for a year with marriage
possibly ensuing. Hey, not every society can come up with speed dating.
Christianity would
replace Paganism within a few short centuries after Christ. The West took
up the new faith easily enough, but the people were attached to many of the old
ways. The excesses of the Lupercalia could only offend the theologically
advanced of the new dispensation. The masses would have to be weaned away
from the ancient practices.
Something the church
did not lack was an abundance of martyrs. One that died for love could
fill the bill in co-opting the pagan holiday. Valentinus was the man for
the job. He was a priest at the time Emperor Claudius was persecuting the
faithful. Against an imperial
prohibition, the cleric married Christians and was jailed for it.
Valentinus would talk
with his jailer’s daughter, eventually converting her. In his last letter, he told her to stay
strong in her faith and signed it, “your Valentinus.” The next day on February 14th 270 A.D. he was martyred.
Whether fact or legend, Pope Gelasius established his feast day in 496
A.D. noting the saint was among those “whose names are justly reverenced among
men, but whose acts are known only to God."
In the post-Roman
age, Saint Valentine’s Day was celebrated here and there, but was not a major
event. The Lupercalian overtones continued, with doves, known for fidelity
becoming symbols. In Hamlet, the doomed Ophelia in her madness sings of
it.
The Calvinist
Reformation was not kind to the day. The Puritans who came to New England
treated it almost as they did Christmas, which, while not a hanging offense,
was near anathema. In spite of that, some vestiges remained. The
stern Puritan, John Winthrop, who would become governor of the Massachusetts
Bay Colony, while still in England wrote in a letter to his wife that he hoped
she was his valentine.
It would take about a
couple of centuries for the holiday to attain widespread popularity. For
this we owe a debt to the postal system in the Mother Country. In 1840
the British restructured rates, dramatically lowering the cost of mailing a
letter. The penny post made it much cheaper to be romantic.
As they did to
promote the acceptance of Christmas as a commercial holiday, merchants promoted
Valentines Day through newspaper advertising.
America was in thrall
to almost everything English. Anglophilia being in vogue, when London had
its opulent Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1851, it would be necessary for New
York to copy it. In 1853, Gotham would put on a similar, if not
more sumptuous display with its own Crystal Palace.
Well, if we could do
as well as the Brits in the field of proto world’s fairs, we could be even more
commercially romantic with Yankee ingenuity, and we had just the gal to do it.
Esther Howland
pioneered the American Valentine. She had graduated from Mount Holyoke
when it was an academy and returned home to her parents’ house afterward.
Dad owned a stationery store in Worcester. Esther saw an English
paper lace valentine and said she could do better and proceeded to. Her
salesman brother took samples on a trip and came back with $5,000 in orders and
an industry was born.
The third floor of
the family home was converted into a valentine’s card factory. The cards
sold for from a few cents to ten dollars. Esther knew about branding, the
back of each was embossed with a red H. By the 1860s her company was
making hundreds of thousands of dollars, a vast sum in the day.
Esther never married.
She sold her business to take care of her parents. The buyer, George C.
Whitney Company, continued to make the valentines in Worcester until 1942.
There is a local
connection. A couple of lovely portraits of her parents are on display at
the Fitch House in Old Sturbridge Village.
The association of
chocolate and the day is even newer than the mass produced valentine.
This is because until the second half of the 19th Century, chocolate meant
a beverage, and not a confection. In fact, there was no chocolate in
chocolate cake in the same sense there is no coffee in coffee cake. The
recipe for chocolate cake from a famous cookbook, The Virginia Housewife, had
recipes without any cocoa.
With the invention of
a process known as “conching” chocolate could be made into candy. In 1868
Richard Cadbury came up with the heart shaped candy filled box, connecting
chocolate to the holiday.
We have come along way
since the Lupercalia, or have we? A young couple from ancient times or
prehistory transported to the present would not understand. Then again, they would not comprehend
much about our times. It is doubtful they would think the day interesting
or fun without the raucous festivities. Until, of course, they had some
chocolate.
Tom Kelleher of Old
Sturbridge Village consulted for this article. The Village is holding Be Mine: Chocolate and Valentines on
Saturday, February 8th
and Sunday the 9th.
