Valentine History

Valentine's Day has a Rosy History   

Youngesters who exchange Valentine's on Feb. 14th are taking part in a custom which is more than 600 years old.

People in England probably celebrated Valentine's Day as early as the 1400's, but there are differing stories or legends about the origins of both the name and the selection of that particular date.

The early Christian church had at least two saints named Valentine One Valentine is associated with lovers because he disobeyed the order ofthe Roman Emperor Claudius II in the A.D. 200's. Claudius thought single men made better soldiers and forbade their marrying, but Valentine opted on the side of young lovers and secretly married couples.

The other Saint Valentine was imprisoned by the Romans for refusing to worship their gods. He was a favorite of children who supposedly tossed affectionate notes between the bars of his cell windows, which may explain why people exchange messages on Valentine's Day.

Saint Valentine who knows which one was executed on Feb. 14th about 269 A.D. the church formally set that date as St. Valentine's Day.

The earliest records of Valentine's Day in English also tell that birds chose their mates on Feb. 14th.

Geoffrey Chaucer, an English poet of the 1300's wrote: "For this was on St. Valentine's Day, "When fowl commeth there to choose his mate."

Another Valentine story traces the custom of sending verses to a Frenchman, Charles, Duke of Orleans, who was captured by the English during the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, and taken to England where he was imprisoned. On Valentine's Day he sent his wife a rhymed love letter from his cell in the Tower of London.

Many early Valentine's Day customs involved ways that single women could learn who their furture husbands would be. Englishwomen of the 1700's wrote men's names on scraps of paper, rolled each in a little piece of clay, and dropped them all into water. The first paper that rose to the surface supposedly bore the name of the woman's true love.

Commercial Valentines emerged in the early 1800's but today's children, instead of purchasing ready-made cards, often make their own Valentines from paper doilies, red paper and pictures cut from magazines. Kits are also available which include everything needed to assemble the cards.

But wheather the cards are a simple homemade variety or a fancied up version with lace, ribbons and cupids, the message has remained the same down throught the years: 

  "Be My Valentine!"