Happy Valentine’s Day!!!

So now it’s Valentine, time passes by so quickly. I hope everyone will spend a good day with your loved ones. Well as before I have nothing mush to say, so I’ll write something about history of Valentine’s Day.

Valentine’s Day is an old tradition thought to have originated from a Roman Festival known as Lupercalia. It was held on February 15 as a fertility festival dedicated to Faunus, the Roman god of agriculture. During the celebrations boys would draw names of girls from a box and the pair would be partners during the festival. These matches often led to marriage.

The festival survived the initial rise of Christianity but was outlawed at the end of the 5th century when Pope Gelasius declared February 14 St Valentine’s Day.

Well about the first St. Valentine, the Catholic Church recognizes at least three different saints named Valentine or Valentinus, all of whom were martyred. There is one idea that he was a priest from Rome who served in the 3rd century. Emperor Claudius II banned marriage when he decided that single men made better soldiers and when Valentine felt this was unfair he broke the rules and arranged marriages in secret. But when the emperor found out he was thrown in jail and sentenced to death.

There are other legends that suggest he may have been killed for attempting to help Christians escape harsh Roman prisons where they were beaten and tortured.

Another idea is that when he was sent to prison, he sent a letter to a young girl he had fallen in love with and signed it “From your Valentine”. It’s thought this was the first ever Valentine’s Day greeting.

Some believe that Valentine’s Day’s is celebrated mid-February to mark the anniversary of St Valentine’s death. It’s thought to have happened in the middle of the month around 270 AD. Others maintain that the Christian church decided to place St Valentine’s feast day at this time of the year in an effort to ‘Christianise’ the pagan festival of Lupercalia.

Roses have been the symbol of love since the early 1700s when Charles II of Sweden brought the Persian poetical art known as the “language of flowers” to Europe. Throughout the 18th century, ladies loved their floral dictionaries, which listed the symbolic meanings of different flowers. The red rose was believed to be the flower favoured by Venus, the Roman Goddess of Love, and has therefore come to represent that.

(Creadits to YourTango.com, History.com & Gemma Mullin@Mirror.co)

To-morrow is Saint Valentine’s day,
All in the morning betime,
And I a maid at your window,
To be your Valentine.
Then up he rose, and donn’d his clothes,
And dupp’d the chamber-door;
Let in the maid, that out a maid
Never departed more.

— William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act IV, Scene 5

And new chapter will be out, at the end of the day… probably… =_=;

So that’s it! have a Happy Valentine’s everyone!