Fun Facts About Valentine's Day: Pagans, Persians, Saints, and Capitalism

Who was Saint Valentine and why do we celebrate him by getting yelled at by our girlfriends for not remembering to buy shit on February 14th? Historians have a hard time answering this question. There were a bunch of guys running around spreading Christianity who went by the name Valentinus who got martyred for their troubles. It doesn’t really matter because most of them had nothing to do with love and most of them earned martyr status by performing miracles like making rich blind girls see again through the glory of god. Anyone whose bullshit meter isn’t broken knows God doesn’t cure amputees … or blind pagans. It was all part of the Catholic Church’s 3rd century fake news public relations campaign “Pack the Pews.”

Around this time, pagan Romans were celebrating their yearly fertility festival Lupercalia. This involved a bunch of drunken naked guys running around whipping chicks with straps of goat skin to help them get pregnant. Honestly though; that was like, pretty much every pagan holiday. The Roman Catholic Church has a long history of co-opting pagan holidays into Christian Mythology and making them far less naked and fun so it would make sense to assume Valentine’s Day and Lupercalia were connected, but there’s no hard evidence that they are.

A more plausible case for Valentine’s Day comes from Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales.” The feast for Saint Valentine happened in February, which coincided with English bird mating season.

(Technically, bird date rape season starts more around May, but the Chaucer connection is still better documented and more believable than priests with magic jazz hands who cure the blind but can’t avoid getting their heads chopped off.)

Chaucer wrote about a couple sending love letters on the day of Valentine’s feast while the bird-orgypocalypse was going on. British “lovebirds” who knew how to read grabbed onto the idea and ran with it. Then all the peasants started copying them and February 14th became the most dreaded day of the year for English men.

Valentine's Day started out with guys having to come up with shitty poetry to woo the girls with. This sucked because guys had better things to do, like avoiding the plague, so they harnessed the power of the printing press and just popped down to “Gutenburg’s Ye Olde Printe’ Shoppe’” and bought some shitty poetry to hand to her. In 1840 the postage stamp was invented, allowing men to just drop a card in the mailbox and go back to polishing their sword. That was a penis joke, in case you didn’t get it.

Medieval Persians had a secret love code where you gave different types flowers to the girl you were wooing to show your intention while maintaining plausible deniability in case she said no and her father chopped your head off. Roses signified love while poppies meant you wanted to finger her behind the skating rink this Saturday. If you got slapped you could say, “I’m sorry! I didn’t know what it meant…unless you’re gonna do it?”

In the 1700’s Charles the second of Sweden got back from Rumspringa in Persia and brought “The Language of Flowers” with him. If you gave your shorty a whole bouquet of flowers, she’d have to sit down with a flower dictionary for forty five minutes to decipher all the implications of what you wanted to do with her butthole. This was a HUGE success because if there’s anything women love, it’s plausible deniability and making shit unnecessarily difficult. They eventually fucked up the whole point of giving flowers by tossing aside the meaning behind them and changed it to “Just buy me shit.”

British chocolate company Cadbury smelled a golden opportunity and harnessed women’s seeming inability to feel good about themselves without inconveniencing a man and started selling heart shaped boxes filled with chocolates to guys who wanted to get laid.

In 1913 American company Hallmark saw what was going on and said, “God dammit! This is Murica! If anyone is going to suck the joy out of something special by overcommercializing it, it’s gonna be US.” So they started churning out shitty Valentine cards featuring unfunny cartoons faster than Usain Bolt at a Klan rally.

The rest is History.

(hmmm. That might be my new catch phrase since Wubalubadubdub was already taken. What do you guys think?)

Sources, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6