Road Apples by Tim Sanders
Feb. 13, 2012

Updating the old Valentine's Day story

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There is no law that each holiday must be accompanied by a holiday specific column. I’ve never written a Guy Fawkes Day column, or a Bastille Day column, or a Wear Clean Underwear to Protect the Environment Day column either, for that matter. I have, over the years, written a few Valentine’s Day columns. That is not because I am obsessed with Valentines, but only because I can never seem to clarify the historical details about St. Valentine. The story keeps changing.

But this time I think maybe I’ve finally got it straight. Here goes:


• In ancient Rome, the Feast of Lupercalia was usually celebrated on February 14, weather permitting. Lupercalus was the Roman god of fertility and sheep. In those days, a fertile sheep was a happy sheep, and happy sheep meant happy shepherds.

• The ancient Romans also believed that birds always chose their mates on February 14, by which time all the feathers they’d lost during the winter molting season had grown back and they were no longer bald and once again attractive. As attractive as a bird can be, anyway. Geoffrey Chaucer even mentioned this Valentine’s Day molting and mating phenomenon in 1382, when he wrote “For this was on seynt Volantynys day/Whan every bryd comyth there to chese his make.” Unfortunately the quote was in Middle English, and nobody could make heads or tails out of any of it except for the cheese making part.

• St. Valentine’s Day was the early Christian alternative to the Pagans’ Lupercalia and their celebration of new plumage. The Christians were strong supporters of fertility among sheep and birds and humans, just like the Pagans, but they required more formalities, like cards, flowers, and large boxes of dried prunes to accompany their celebration. They also required a genuine saint.

• In those days the main requirement for sainthood was martyrdom. The most popular mode of martyrdom was beheading, and for reasons which are still unclear to me, a large percentage of people beheaded in the first few centuries were named Valentine. When I wrote about St. Valentine several years ago, I believe there were only four or five of them. One was a Roman priest who aggravated Emperor Claudius the Goat Boy by marrying young Christians in the Catacombs and refusing to collect state and local license fees. He was beaten, set on fire, boiled in oil, and finally, when all else failed, beheaded. Another St. Valentine, this one from the town of Iglesias in Asia Minor, was imprisoned for mailing cards to young ladies without proper postage. The cards, that is. While in prison he sent hundreds of additional cards covered with dainty floral designs to a variety of girls he’d found listed on a directory scratched into the cell wall. Had he known he was courting sainthood, he’d probably have been more careful. He was also beheaded. There were other St. Valentines, including St. Valentine of Eufala, and St. Valentine of Vesuvius who was last seen on August 24, 79 AD, standing beside a highway just outside of Pompeii holding a sign that read “IS IT HOT AND STUFFY OUT HERE, OR IS IT JUST ME?” But now the number has grown to seventeen. Eighteen if you count St. Valentine of Seville, who was not exactly beheaded, but did lose an ear in a barber shop mishap and miraculously reattached it to his own head without losing a single drop of blood. And without a mirror, apparently, since he was also known as St. Valentine of the backwards ear. Almost all of the Valentines died on February 14.


There is a great deal more to the history of the holiday, but I am tired. If you really want to know when it was that the human heart came to officially symbolize romantic love, leaving popular phrases like “Ah Mary, whene’er I see thee my spleen it starts to soar” and “Oh, be still my foolish colon” by the wayside, you’ll have to look that up for yourself. And you’ll also have to do your own homework to learn just when it was that the old American tradition of a nice, freshly skinned 20 lb. Valentine’s Day flathead catfish was replaced with a crummy 2 lb. box of Whitman’s Samplers. You might also like to read about the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, which occurred in 1929 and helped spark new interest in the ancient holiday.

Other topics for research could include why it is that a grown woman, mature and happily married, would want a huge teddy bear the size of the late Orson Welles when she already has a perfectly good husband to decorate her couch. Or just what the Valentine’s Day attraction is to 5 lb. Gummy Bears “equal to 1400 regular-sized bears,” or to leopard pajamas, complete with leopard tail, leopard hood and little leopard ears. Like most men, I am not qualified to answer those questions.