Valentine's Day Celebration Everythings On Sale But Why?

Would you believe that in ancient Rome, love was a lottery? A cruel one at that. Here's how it worked. A male teen's right to passage to the Roman God Lupercus was through a teenage girl. Each year, all the available teenage girls in the city wwere placed in a box and a male picked a name aat random. She was assigned to him for a year. It would take 8 more centuries before the church fathers put an end to it. They discovered it was a sort of celebration of a relatively unknown bishop named Valentine who had been martyred two centuries prior to the beginning of the Roman tradition.

For eight centuries, the practice later known as Valentine's Day was a cruel Roman ritual, actually a lottery of sorts. It all started in the 4th Century B.C.. A post-puberty young man's right to passage was to the God Lupercus. Names of teenage women were drawn from a box by the young men and they were assigned the woman for a year to do with as he pleased, within the restraints of Roman culture which were rather lax at the time. Finally in 4 A.D the early church leaders stopped the cruel practice after an evaluation of how it had been created in the first place.

Church records show that a priest who lived near Rome in 270 A.D., St Valentine was the inspiration. It was a time when Emperor Claudius 11 issued an edict forbidding marriage , as he felt married men were too emotionally attached to their families and did not make good fighters. On top of that, the Roman Empire was about to see its final days.

St. Valentine, a bishop, noticed how traumatic it was for young lovers to be unable to marry. So he performed secret weddings in hidden-away places. It did not take long for Claudius to discover these "drive-by" weddings and have him arrested. Claudius had conflicted emotions regarding the arrest of Valentine and attempted to convert him to the Roman gods to save him from being put to death.

On February 24th, 270, Claudius put him to death.

While Valentine was in prison awaiting his fate, he came in contact with his jailer, Asterius. The jailer had a blind daughter. Asterius requested him to heal his daughter. Through his faith he miraculously restored the sight of Asterius' daughter. Just before his execution, he asked for a pen and paper from his jailer, and signed a farewell message to her "From Your Valentine," a phrase that lived ever after.

Valentine was later named a Patron Saint, and spiritual overseer of an annual festival. The festival involved young Romans offering women they admired, and wished to court, handwritten greetings of affection on February 14. The greeting cards acquired St. Valentine's namesake and still has it.

The Valentine's Day card spread with Christianity, and is now celebrated all over the world, and of course is a nonsectarian holiday celebrated by almost all faiths, and people of none. One of the earliest Valentine's cards on record was sent in 1415 by Charles, Duke of Orleans, to his wife while he was a prisoner in the Tower of London. The card is now preserved in the British Museum.

Valentine's Day history was a surprise to me. I just discovered it today at age 53 and found it fascinating. So as an online retailer, what I decided to do was add a "Sex, Love, & Relationship" section to my main gift shop, and mark everything down up to 80% just through Valentine's day, just to make the Patron Saint proud. It can include a gift card and the customer does not have to sign it "From Your Valentine" but can if he/she wishes.