A Brief History of the Valentines Day Holiday:
As early as the fourth century B.C., the Romans engaged in an annual
young man's rite of passage to the god Lupercus. The names of teenage women
were placed in a box and drawn at random by adolescent men. Thus, a man was
assigned a woman companion, for their mutual entertainment and pleasure
(often sexual), for the duration of a year, after which another lottery
was staged.
Determined to put an end to this 800-year-old practice, the early
church fathers sought a "lovers" saint to replace the deity Lupercus.
They found a likely candidate in Valentine, a bishop who had been martyred
some 200 years earlier.
Traditionally, mid-February was a time for Romans to meet and
court prospective mates. Young men offered women they admired and wished
to court handwritten greetings of affection on February 14. The cards
acquired St. Valentine's name.
As Christianity spread, so did the Valentine's Day card. The
earliest one was sent in 1415 by Charles, Duke of Orleans, to his
wife while he was a prisoner in the Tower of London. It is now in the
British Museum.
The first American publisher of Valentines was printer and artist
Esther Howland. Her elaborate lace cards of the 1870s cost from five to
ten dollars, with some selling for as much as thirty-five dollars.
Since that time, the Valentine card business has flourished. Except for
Christmas, Americans exchange more cards on Valentine's Day than at any
other time of the year.
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