St. Valentine, who?

Happy Day after... Any hangovers out there? I have a chocolate hangover. Called a migraine. whee. Hubby gave me a box of hand-picked Godiva truffles in the morning before he left for work...then a 1lb ballotin of Godiva after dinner. Yeah. That's a lot of chocolate.

My middle daughter, 16 going on 25, think Valentine's Day is "rubbish". She's complained about the commercial part of it for years (hey, give me my Godiva, lol). This year, in her Latin class, they learned about Saint Valentine. My daughter isn't buying it that we should celebrate a saint's murder. But it's more complex than that.

There are a couple of saints with the name Valentine (Valentinus), and it's a little sketchy as to which one is supposedly the reason for Valentine's Day. Generally, there's agreement that it is the Valentinus who was killed near Rome in the third century around the ides of February.

But it's those ides that are interesting. Traditionally, in Rome, the ides of February (the 15th) was the fertility celebration in Rome known as Lupercalia. On this day, the Romans paid homage to both Faunus, the Roman god of agriculture, and Romulus and Remus, the twin founders of Rome. It sounds like a pretty cool event. The priests would go to the cave where the twins were raised by a wolf. They sacrificed a goat and a dog, performed their rites, then took strips of the goat's hide and dipped them in blood. They would then mark fields with the blood, and also mark Roman women--to give them increased fertility.

Um, I'll take the chocolate.

So, if you didn't know it already, Valentine's Day was an offshoot (some say a cover-up) of a pagan holiday--like many other of our modern holidays (Christmas, Easter...).

How did you celebrate?

Kerry