Shakespeare once described love as “a smoke made with the fume of sighs”. And as abstract as it may sound, we all know it when it’s love, we feel it.
Some people, nevertheless, could not fairly express their love. The fear that the feeling is unrequited, inappropriate or simply foolish, has in a way prevented them from receiving God’s ultimate give, to love and to be loved back. And that’s why Valentine’s Day is not just special, but also necessary.
Dating back, the history of the day started during the reigning time of Emperor Claudius II in the third century of the Roman Empire. It was told that Claudius II, feeling that single men made better soldiers than those with wives and families, decided to outlawed marriage for young men. Valentine, a priest served during such time, defied Claudius and continued to perform marriages for young lovers in secret.
He was sentenced to death when found out, but this lead to another story. Legend has it that while in jail, Valentine performed a miracle by healing the jailer’s blind daughter and fell in love with her. He sent the first ‘Valentine’ greeting the night before his execution, a letter signed “From your Valentine” to the healed daughter.
Finally executed in mid February, around 269 AD, the time of his death was later celebrated as Valentine’s Day.
The above legend does sound like a make believe, but it was recorded in history that a Christian priest named Valentinus was martyred on Feb. 14 about 269 AD and buried in Via Flaminia, the most important Roman road to the north leading from Rome to Rimini.
There are a number of martyrs named Valentine in the early days, most notably Valentine of Terni, who died in Feb. 14 about 197 AD -with relics found at the Church of Saint Praxed in Rome and at Whitefriar Street Carmelite Church in Dublin, Ireland, and a third saint mentioned in the Catholic Encyclopedia from www.catholic.com, who died at the same date in Africa.
In 496 AD, the last of three popes with disputable African origin in the Roman Catholic Church named Pope Gelasius I, decided to shift the Roman feast of Lupercalia, a pagan love festival that fall on Feb. 15, to the 14th and officially named it St. Valentine’s Day. Gelasius died that year, but it was his decision that finally gave correlation between Valentine’s Day and love, in which the pagan aspect of Lupercalia was omitted.
There are many stories leading to the celebration of Valentine’s Day, but the sending of Valentine’s greeting card did not become a huge fashion until about late 1840s, especially in Great Britain and the U.S.
As a matter of fact, the Valentine’s Day we know today is considered as one of the Hallmark’s holiday in U.S., which in commercial purposes marked the second biggest selling of greeting cards for a specific day after Christmas Day, leaving the three other holydays, namely the Sweetest Day, Mother's Day and Fathers' Day behind. The U.S. Greeting Card Association also estimates that approximately one billion Valentine’s cards are sent each year worldwide with men spending twice as much as women.
But how did chocolate candies and bars become an important part of the celebration, if the solid form of chocolate wasn’t even invented until 1830 by Joseph Fry & Sons?
There was no solid evidence on how chocolate suddenly meddled in the celebration except for the fact that Richard Cadbury created the first known heart-shaped candy box for Valentine’s Day in 1861, having his son John to mass marketed the first boxes of chocolate candies in 1868 after introducing chocolate bars in 1849 with Joseph Fry & Sons at an exhibition in Bingley Hall, Birmingham, England.
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yup, ini sebenernya cuman referensi dari berbagai informasi tentang Valentine's Day di internet. Yaa setidaknya tau lah apaan si Valentine bagi yang emang ngasi kembang ke pacarnya, cekidot
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