All the romance of Valentine’s Day. What does Valentine’s Day mean to you? Since the Romans started it all back in the year 496, it has been celebrated on February 14th. It has come to mean that it’s the day when we show our loved ones how much we care about them. How you’re the Romeo to your Juliet, Mark Antony to Cleopatra, Han Solo to Princess Leia or if you’re that way inclined, Kermit the Frog to Miss Piggy.
But who was St Valentine? How did cards, red roses and chocolate become a traditional part of it? Has it become just a cheesy cliché in our modern times or does it still hold a place in our hearts?
Valentine’s Day is thought to have originated from a Roman festival called Lupercalia held in February to officially mark the start of their springtime.
One of the most popular legends surrounding St.Valentine is that he was executed by Roman Emperor Claudius 11 on that day during the third century AD. He had conducted marriages in secret after Claudius had outlawed marriage for young men who apparently were better soldiers when not romantically attached. He fell in love with the jailor’s daughter and when taken to be killed on February 14th sent her a love letter signed, ‘from your Valentine’. In the fifth century, the Catholic Church outlawed Lupercalia and officially declared the date as the Feast of St. Valentine.
The oldest known Valentine message written in English was penned in 1477. It was written in prison to his wife by Charles, Duke of Orleans after he was captured at the Battle of Agincourt. Nowadays around 25 million Valentine cards are sent in the UK alone every year. Over a billion cards are sold worldwide making it the second largest card sending occasion of the year.
“O my luve is like a red, red rose.” Robert Burns must have been ahead of his time or fluent in the Victorian language of flowers as red roses meant romance in that era. Going back even further in time, Roman mythology states that red roses were the favourite flower of Venus, the goddess of love, as the bud stands for strong romantic feelings. Whether it’s a single beautiful stem or the fashionable and pricey dozen, it seems that the meaning of red roses has never waned and approximately 224 million roses are grown for Valentine's Day each year.
Should you receive a box of chocolates this Valentine’s Day, you have Richard Cadbury to thank. After he and his brother took over the family’s chocolate manufacturing business, he discovered a way to use the pure cocoa butter to make a more palatable drinking chocolate. It resulted in more cocoa butter than he needed so he put it in ‘eating chocolates’ which he packaged in lovely boxes he designed himself. A marketing genius, Cadbury began putting the Cupids and rosebuds on heart-shaped boxes in 1861. Now around 36 million heart-shaped boxes are sold every year in the UK.
So cynic or romantic? Big-hearted gestures or little meaningful ways to show how much you care. At Newlands we help arrange romantic dinners à deux, deliveries of pink champagne, heart-shaped canapés, special balloons, and flower arrangements, we’ll do our utmost to help make Valentine’s Day a real occasion . Because we care too.
