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valentine's day As romantics (and even non-romantics) know, February 14 is Valentine's Day. The word "valentine" means a card that is sent, a gift, or a sweetheart. Actually, February 14 is Saint Valentine's Day. Exactly who Saint Valentine was is not clear. He may have been a Roman priest who suffered martyrdom, or the Bishop of Terni who was also martyred in the 3rd century. It may also be the case that these two were really one person about whom two different stories arose. Several stories explain how Febrary 14 came to be associated with romance, sweethearts, and note-giving. One is that the traditions of the Roman festival for Juno, celebrated on Febrary 14, and the Feast of Lupercalia, beginning February 15, form the basis of our modern holiday. Juno was the Queen Goddess and was associated with women and marriage. The night before the Feast of Lupercalia, each young man drew the name of a young woman and she became his partner for the duration of the festivities. The celebrations of these two holidays became merged and assigned to Saint Valentine by the early church. Another story says that the Roman priest who was martyred had been secretly marrying couples; marriage had been forbidden for young men by the Roman emperor because he wanted unmarried men for his soldiers. For his romantic crime, Valentine was put in prison. Yet another story says that Valentine had made friends with many children who tossed him notes while he was imprisoned. Another theory credits the association between Valentine's Day and romance because of the similarity between the name Valentine and the Norman French word "galantin", the name of a saint which means "a lover of women." In more "recent" times, it may be that Chaucer, in his book The Parliament of Fools of the 1380's, was the first person to associate Saint Valentine's day with choosing a sweetheart and all the resulting gift-giving and note-sending. It is impossible to say which of these stories is the foundation for our Valentine's Day. Perhaps each of them has contributed something to our modern holiday.
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