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Primer On Valentine's Day

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By JOHN HERBERT

From Where I Sit

Published: February 12, 2008

Most of us give candy or flowers on Valentine's Day. Some send greeting cards. Gangster Al Capone allegedly sent bullets to punctuate the bloodiest Valentine's Day in history, back in 1929.
Capone was safely vacationing in Florida when he is supposed to have issued the death warrants on seven competing Chicago bootleggers gunned down in "The St. Valentine's Day Massacre."
The shooting site, an auto repair shop, is now a fenced-in plot of grass. After a few years as an antique furniture store, the original massacre site was bulldozed in 1967. It had been attracting more curiosity-seekers than customers. Many of the bricks, pockmarked by bullets, were sold as souvenirs.
Valentine's Day has a particularly violent 2,000-year history. There were believed to have been three different St. Valentines early in the first millennium. All three were terminated "with extreme prejudice," as James Bond used to describe executions. They were decapitated by either the pope or a Roman emperor, coincidentally all on Feb. 14.
If there'd been an ACLU back then, it would have been itching for the Valentine's cases, which apparently had to do with illicit marriages, military service and the smuggling of love notes. Alternatively, the trio of stories could all be legend. Who knows?
One St. Valentine, around the year 270 A.D., was a vacationing priest who ran afoul of the Roman emperor by clandestinely marrying young couples. The emperor thought bachelors made better warriors (fewer family distractions).
Depending on which version is most credible, this St. Valentine may have otherwise been executed for assisting the ancient equivalent of draft evaders in escaping service in the Roman cause. More specifically, he's supposed to have helped Christians flee Roman beatings and torture.
Arrested by Roman troops for whatever reason, St. Valentine was eventually put on the chopping block by Emperor Claudius II.
A second St. Valentine was already locked up — why, neither history nor legend say — when he started sending love letters to his jailor's daughter, a frequent visitor to the prisoner behind bars. Before he was executed, the saint allegedly penned one last letter to the girl, signing it "From your Valentine." Sound familiar?
Little is known of a third St. Valentine. He was supposed to have been a priest spreading Christianity in Africa. When he refused to renounce his religion on orders from the Roman emperor, version three of St. Valentine also lost his head.
During the latter days of the Roman Empire, in 496 A.D., the reigning pope selected Feb. 14 as Valentine's Day because it marked the birthday of the so-called "Queen" of Roman gods and goddesses. A festival was staged in which Roman boys drew lots to see who'd be their girlfriend for the coming year.
By the end of the 14th century, the old Roman love-in was definitely over. The transition was when Chaucer, the poet laureate of the age, authored a rhyme(?) to celebrate a royal engagement. In it, he linked the mating of birds to St. Valentine.
The Catholic Church removed Valentine's Day from the mainstays of its religious calendar in 1969, noting that none of the saints' origins or histories could be verified. We haven't made any authentication headway in the last 30 years, either.
There was a revival of Valentine's Day when the 18th-century English exchanged gifts and even lacy, hand-made greeting cards. Valentine's Day traditions caught on in America about 100 years later when a Massachusetts woman started mass-producing holiday greeting cards featuring cupids and hearts.
Valentine's Day has been an American commercial success ever since. Valentines, with some 25 percent of the greeting card market, give Christmas cards a run for their money.
While you can never go wrong with flowers, I've never understood why you should send chocolates to your favorite lady friends. All that candy settles unflatteringly right around a girl's middle — or around my beer belly!

A regular columnist for Hernando Today, John Herbert lives in Spring Hill.

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