What price love? Valentine’s Day around the world

Zoë Sharp

Today is Valentine’s Day, also called Saint Valentine’s Day or the Feast of Saint Valentine, as you prefer. Apparently, more than 60% of Americans will celebrate by the purchase of cards, flowers, chocolates and candlelit dinners for two, to the tune of over $13,000,000,000.

Mind-boggling, isn’t it?

To stay on the US statistical bandwagon for a moment, a little over 70% of the well-nigh 200 million roses produced for the day are bought by men, but 85% of the 180 million cards purchasers are women. Around 11,000 children will be conceived today. Nearly 15% of women will send themselves flowers. Over $230 million will be spent by owners on their pets.

We Brits spend over £900 million, which breaks down to about the global average per head, allegedly. The 25-34 age group are the most generous, with people living in the southeast and Wales the least likely to celebrate. The Germans spend the least on Valentine’s Day, with a third of them admitting they’ve forgotten it altogether.

In Japan February 14^th is when women give men chocolate, but Japanese women have to wait until March 14^th for men to give them romantic gifts. In Wales, St Dwynwen’s Day on January 25^th is when lovers exchange intricately carved wooden spoons, in a tradition dating back to the 16^th century.

In Brazil, June 12^th is Dia dos Namorados, the day of lovers. The 13th is St Anthony’s Day – the patron saint of marriage – when women perform simpatias in the hope of being the next to wed.

In China the festival of Qixi takes place on the seventh day of the seventh month of the Chinese calendar. Originating from a tale of two separated lovers, who were only allowed to meet once a year. Singletons hope for a partner and couples hope for good fortune.

In Romania they celebrate Dragobete on February 24^th, ‘the day the birds are betrothed’, which is a mix of Valentine’s Day and a celebration of Spring. Picking flowers in the woods and washing your face in snow is supposed to bring health and happiness.

In South Korea, the 14^th of every month is a time to celebrate love, including Kiss Day in June and Hug Day in December. April 14^th is Black Day, when singletons eat black noodles to console themselves on their unmarried status.

It’s thought one of the origins of Valentine’s Day is the ancient festival of Lupercalia, observed on February 13-15^th to purge evil spirits and release health and fertility. The name comes from the Latin for wolf lupus after the she-wolf who nurtured Romulus and Remus, founders of Rome. It involved sacrificing two goats and a dog, wearing the goatskins and running about striking any women who hoped to become pregnant. It is thought the church chose this date in order to Christianise an existing holiday.

As for the actual Valentine, there we hit a slight snag, as there were quite a few of them. In fact, the one whose day we celebrate on February 14^th is officially known as St Valentine of Rome, just to make it clear. One account from the 13^thC is of a temple priest who was martyred by Emperor Claudius II for helping Christian couples to marry. Altogether there are a dozen St Valentines on the official list of recognised saints, so you can take your pick of dates to celebrate, including July 25^th, which is the date honouring the only female St Valentine – or Valentina – a virgin martyred in Palestine in AD 308.

Not only is St Valentine the patron saint of lovers, engaged couples and happy marriages, he is also responsible for watching over epileptics, beekeepers, fainting, travellers and the plague.

It is thought that the poet Geoffrey Chaucer popularised the idea of St Valentine’s Day being linked to romance in his poem ‘Parliament of Foules’ in the latter half of the 14thC, when he wrote of it as the day birds and humans try to find a mate.

So, what does all this talk of romance have to do with us crime writers? Well, when I originally started to write the Charlie Fox series, I thought I was telling Charlie’s story, and hers alone. As the series has progressed, however, I’ve found that readers are as intrigued by the relationship between Charlie and Sean Meyer as they are about the crime or thriller elements of the plot.

Relationships are generally filled with conflicts. Conflict is what makes characters discover much about themselves and it’s one of the things we as authors ask at the beginning stage of any story: What does this character want and what is preventing them from achieving their aim?

What about you? Where do you stand on the importance of relationships and romance in a straight crime thriller, or should that be the purview of the specialist romantic suspense genre?

And how will you be spending Valentine’s Day?

This week’s Word of the Week is chimerical, meaning fantastical, improbable or visionary, someone who is given to fantastic schemes, from chimera, from Greek mythology, a fire-breathing female monster with a lion’s head, a goat’s body and a serpent’s tail, a thing which is hoped for but which is impossible to achieve. 

Happy Bishop Of Terni Day

Happy February the 14^th blog ! St Valentine’s Day! The patron saint of florists and chocolatiers. He is also the saint of love, engaged couples, young people, beekeepers, epilepsy, fainting, plague, and travellers. So if you are a young bee keeper with epilepsy and need a bouquet to hide your infected buboes  as you go on a journey to see your betrothed…. he’s your man.

It all seemed to be much more fun pre Christianity when the eligible men about town would run around dressed in the skin of a (recently) dead goat, whipping the backsides of young ladies with a thong of leather dripped in goat blood. Sounds like a normal Saturday night in Sauchiehall Street to me but in those days it was all in aid of fertility. Like an early form of IVF.

And in Sauchiehall Street, it still is.

In ancient Rome the 13^th, 14h and 15^th of February was a pagan fertility festival called Lupercalia. Lupercus being the Roman god of fertility. And that has all to do with Romulus and Remus and having a wolf for your mother and other stuff Freud would have a field day with. I don’t think it too much of a stretch of the imagination to suggest that pope Galasius, being a good Christian, might have frowned on all this happiness and frolicking but was also very aware that the one way to encourage bad behaviour is to ban it.

 So he simply absorbed it into the Christian calendar, much to the relief of greeting card companies all over the globe. The 14^th of February has remained a celebration of love, but the fun aspect of being spanked on the backside by a drunk with a whip while running through the street has evolved somewhat. It was thought that a blow from the whip (a februa) encouraged fertility in woman. The festival was called Febraiatus, from the verb februare to purify… hence that month is called February.!!!!

Hurrah!!

So it was all about fertility, purity, immunity from curses, protection from bad luck and the encouragement of reproduction. No doubt there was also the sense that spring and sunshine might be on their way.

The identity of the Saint Valentine (s) actually celebrated on the 14th of February is open to all kinds of conjecture but you can take your pick and mix and match from four different possibilities to suit your own taste.

The one thing they have in common? They all died a brutal death…. Well who said love was good for you…

Valentine the first contender! Valentinus of Rome.

In the days of Roman emperor Claudius II, only single men got drafted into the army so the clever ones got married to avoid it. Valentinus was executed on 14^th Feb (conveniently) for performing marriages so that young men could avoid the draft… Just to cheer him up young lovers would visit him as he sat on death row and told him how much better love was than war. Bet that put his mind at ease!

 

St Valentine, the second contender.

This one, Valentine of Rome was beheaded and buried on the Via Flaminina and Pope Julius 1^st was supposed to have built a basilica over the grave. He was initially arrested for being Christian, and while in jail he fell in love with the jailer’s daughter, who was blind. Valentine wrote her love notes, signed from ‘your Valentine’.  This restored her sight and the jailor converted to Christianity.

The date of his execution? 14th February (conveniently).

 

 Valentine, the third contender.

The Bishop of Terni, who I always think of as the front runner. Little is known of his life except that he was very amenable – dying conveniently on the 14^th of February.  His relics were taken back to Terni.

He was martyred in the reign of Emperor Aurelian by being imprisoned, tortured then beheaded on the Via Flaminia in Rome for his Christianity. This was by the order of a Roman called…. Placid Furius??? Who sounds so Monty Python he must be real.

 

Valentinus, the fourth contender.

This bloke was a gnostic teacher in Rome and had nothing to do with Valentine’s Day, gnostism came to be regarded as heresy so Valentinus went out of favour slightly but he did argue that love and marriage was central to Christian belief. I think he can be disregarded as he did not have the good grace to die on the 14th of February and this shows some lack of effort on his part.

Moving forward in time, in 1382 Geoffrey Chaucer wrote about St Valentine's Day in celebration of the engagement of Richard II of England and Anne of Bohemia. By Valentine’s Day he probably meant the 2^nd of May which is the saint's day in the liturgical calendar of Valentine of Genoa.

A few years after that the French seem to get in on the act and on 14^th February a court opened in Paris to deal with matters of love, marriage, affairs, divorces etc.  Then in 1415 after the battle of Agincourt, a Frenchman (well it would have to be!) wrote the first recovered Valentine’s note to his sweetheart.  Charles, the Duke of Orleans was being held captive at the time. And probably had nothing better to do.

Two hundred years later Ophelia is harping on about Valentine’s Day to Hamlet who is out on a battlement ignoring her. This is starting to sound more familiar now.

Two hundred years later the passing of Valentine’s notes has become so common that the notes start to be mass produced in early form, a mixture of lace and paper, and we all know that this ends up with the rosy pink, satin sugar coated monstrosities with pictures of puppies with goitre that you can buy today.

Nowadays Valentine’s Day is the biggest card selling/sending event after Christmas.

As this blog appears in Murder is Everywhere, it can’t really end without mentioning the Massacre. In 1929,  Al Capone  (allegedly)  ordered that  five gangster rivals  were ‘taken out’, not in the out for dinner sense, more in the line them up against a wall and shoot them sense.

Somehow roaming naked through the streets drunk whipping your friends on the bum sounds so much more fun..

Caro Ramsay  14th Feb 2014