Roses are Red, Violets are blue, oh, whatever

As much as I like a good holiday, I think I’ll vote for the original Valentine’s Day celebration instead of the current Hallmark version.

In Rome, during the good old pagan days, young men got to celebrate the mid-February event by paying tribute to God Lupercus, who was into the whole spring mating ritual thing.  On the festival of Lupercus, teenage girls would put their names into a box, and the young men would stagger by and each draw a name.  The girl he picked would be his ‘sexual companion’ for the following year.  No strings attached.

Spin forward a few years and you get the Catholics taking the fun out of it.  In their estimation everyone was having way too much fun, so they changed the festival and replaced the girl’s names with names of saints.  You drew a name and were supposed to spend the year emulating the ways of that saint.  I can just see the teenagers begging their parents to go to that shindig.

Besides taking the sex out of the day, Pope Gelasius, leader of the Church at the time, had another problem, he had to find a substitute for Lupercus – after all, Lupercus was a pagan god, couldn’t have that.  So, Gelasius looked back in the archives and found a fellow named Valentine.

Valentine lived in AD 270 under Roman Emperor Claudius.  Claudius and Valentine got to know each other when Claudius banned marriages.  He had banned them when he found out that married men made poor soldiers (go figure - seems like they found a reason not to die).    Well, Mr. Valentine, a romantic at heart, didn’t see the sense of this and began secretly marrying couples anyway.

Claudius found out about this terrible act and sent him to prison.  This, however, didn’t stop Valentine’s sense of the romantic.   Valentine immediately fell in love with the blind daughter of his jailor and spent his time in the dungeon writing love letters to her, which, presumably her father had to read to her.

Alas, this didn’t last long, since, Claudius found out and immediately had him stoned and beheaded.  The beheading seems a bit overkill to me, but whatever.

Okay, back to Pope Gelasius.  Upon his reading this history, he thought to himself that this fellow Valentine would make a perfect candidate as a substitute for Lupercus –so, one canonization later Valentine joins the other 2999 saints. Free from old pagan rituals Gelasius can now go merrily along flogging pagans into loving Valentine.

What with taking all the sex and fun out of the holiday the Valentine’s day tradition wasn’t much until 1415, when along comes Charles, duke of Orleans.  Charles was a French noble who fought at the Battle of Agincourt and doing what the French did a lot back then, he lost.  He was soon hustled off the battlefield and taken to England where he spent the next 25 years confined in various Castles.  

Not one to waste his energy pining away, he passed the time by writing love poems and a complete love-history in ballads, all of which he sent to his wife back in France.  In these poems he was the first to use the name of Valentine, presumably because they both shared the ‘stuck in a dungeon’ thing.  He did this until his ransom was finally paid and he was released and returned home.

The duke instantly became a sort of Romantic hero to the women of the times who all began to expect well written love poems from their suitors - and remember, this was back in the time where you either wrote it yourself or it didn’t happen.  

Can you imagine all the lovesick men, most of whom were illiterate, sitting down to try to compose a poem in hopes of winning the heart of some fair maiden?  I’m assuming their work was accompanied by much mumbling of the name of the duke, wishing that the good duke had stuck to something simple like ‘Roses are Red Violets are Blue, I love you”, instead of his, which usually started out with something like “Strengthen, my Love, this castle of my heart, And with some store of pleasure give me aid….”

What followed were centuries of men struggling to write original poems, until finally around 1800 the first inexpensive commercial Valentines appeared – an event accompanied by a whole planet of men heaving a huge sigh of writer’s block relief.  

And this was soon followed by industrious Americans who, with Hallmark as a guide, spent the following hundred years invented every possible commercial gift you could think of, from heart shaped diamonds to frozen pizza hearts, all to be purchased and gifted in the hopes of getting the affections of that same fair maiden.

Me, I’m writing a Happy Lupercus’ Day Card.