Knowing the Valentine stories

A GNA feature by Hannah Asomaning

Accra, Feb. 6, GNA - Recently, two ladies were heard discussing Valentine's Day on board a commercial bus. One of them tried to convince the other to collect one of the specially designed valentine envelopes and solicit funds for the special valentine dinner to be organized at midnight on Valentine Day.

The other lady, who expressed interest, however, said his boy friend was difficult to convince but she took the envelope and told her friend how much she would love to be part of the dinner. In Ghana it has been reported consistently that there is shortage of condoms on the market on the lovers' day. Nightclubs, drinking bars and other public places of entertainment are filled to capacity on Valentine Day.

Some churches also use the occasion to organize marriage seminars for their members and counselling sessions for the youth. Valentine Day, some may say, must be celebrated to fulfil the God-given command of demonstrating love since love is the greatest of all commandments.

However, others use the celebration of the day as an opportunity to seek romantic partners. Some people associate Valentine Day celebration with sexuality, while others feel it is a day to give out gifts as a way of showing love.

Many promotional activities are aired on radio, television and newspapers to remind every Kofi, Ama and Kwaku that there is a big event coming.

The market is flooded with Valentine cards and there is the display of red colour, flowers, valentine hampers and teddy bears all over the place. The big question is do people understand what and why they celebrate Valentine Day? Do people understand the celebration of Valentine Day?

Stories associated with celebrating Valentine Charles Panati in Panati's Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things, published by Harper & Row, New York, 1987 says, although the mid-February holiday celebrating love remains wildly popular, the confusion over its origins led the Catholic Church in 1969 to drop St. Valentine Day from the Roman calendar of official, worldwide Catholic feasts.

There was a conventional belief in Europe during the Middle Ages that birds chose their partners in the middle of February. The day was dedicated to love and people observed it by writing love letters and sending small gifts to their beloved. Even Legend has it that Charles, Duke of Orleans, sent the first real Valentine card to his wife in 1415, when he was imprisoned in the Tower of London. For Roman men, the day continued to be an occasion to seek the affection of women, and it became a tradition to give out handwritten messages of admiration that included Valentine's name.

Another story has it that in the fourth century BC, the Romans engaged in an annual young man's rite of passage to the god Lupercus. The names of teenage women were placed in a box and drawn at random by adolescent men. Thus, a man was assigned a woman companion, for their mutual entertainment and pleasure, which was often sexual, for the duration of a year, after which another lottery was staged.

Determined to put an end to this 800-year-old practice, the early church fathers sought a "lovers'" saint to replace the deity Lupercus. They found a likely candidate in Valentine, a Bishop who had been martyred some two hundred years earlier.

History about St Valentine

In Rome in AD 270, Bishop Valentine had enraged Emperor Claudius II, who had issued an edict forbidding marriage. Claudius felt that married men made poor soldiers, because they were loath to leave their families for battle.

The empire needed soldiers, so Claudius, never one to fear unpopularity, abolished marriage.

St. Valentine, then bishop of Interamna, invited young lovers to come to him in secret, where he joined them in the sacrament of matrimony.

Claudius, who learned of this "friend of lovers," had Bishop Valentine brought to the palace.

The emperor, impressed with the young priest's dignity and conviction, attempted to convert him to the Roman gods, to save him from otherwise certain execution. However, Bishop Valentine refused to renounce Christianity and imprudently attempted to convert the emperor. On February 24, 270, Valentine was clubbed, stoned, then beheaded. History also asserts that while Valentine was in prison awaiting execution, he fell in love with the blind daughter of the jailer, Asterius, through his unswerving faith, he miraculously restored her sight.

He signed a farewell message to her "From Your Valentine," a phrase that has lived long after its author died.

The Church and Valentine

From the Church's standpoint, Valentine seemed to be the ideal candidate to usurp the popularity of Lupercus, so in AD 496, a stern Pope Gelasius outlawed the mid-February Lupercian festival but retained the lottery, aware of Romans' love for games of chance. In the box that had once held the names of available and willing single women, were placed the names of saints.

Both men and women extracted slips of paper, and in the ensuing year they were expected to emulate the life of the saint whose name they had drawn. Admittedly, it was a different game, with different incentives.

To expect a woman but draw a saint must have disappointed many a Roman male. The spiritual overseer of the entire affair was its patron saint, Valentine.

With reluctance, and the passage of time, more and more Romans relinquished their pagan festival and replaced it with the Church's holy day.

Valentine Cards

Traditionally, mid-February was a Roman time to meet and court prospective mates in accordance with the Lupercian lottery under the penalty of mortal sin.

Roman young men did institute the custom of offering women they admired and wished to court handwritten greetings of affection on February 14. The cards acquired St. Valentine's name. In the sixteenth century Bishop of Geneva, St Francis de Sales attempted to expunge the custom of cards and reinstate the lottery of saints' names.

He felt that Christians had become wayward and needed models to emulate. However, this lottery was less successful and shorter-lived than Pope Gelasius.

The valentine cards proliferated and became more decorative. Cupid, the naked cherub armed with arrows dipped in love potion, became a popular valentine image.

He was associated with the holiday because in Roman mythology he is the son of Venus, goddess of love and beauty.

By the seventeenth century, handmade cards were oversized and elaborate, while store-bought ones were smaller and costly. In 1797, a British publisher issued "The Young Man's Valentine Writer," which contained scores of suggested sentimental verses for the young lovers unable to compose on their own.

Printers had already begun producing a limited number of cards with verses and sketches, called "mechanical valentines," and a reduction in postal rates in the next century ushered in the less personal but easier practice of mailing valentines.

That made it possible for the first time to exchange cards anonymously, which is taken as the reason for the sudden appearance of racy verse in an era otherwise prudish.

The burgeoning number of obscene valentine cards caused several countries to ban the practice of exchanging cards. In Chicago, for instance, late in the nineteenth century, the post office rejected some 25,000 cards on the grounds that they were not fit to be carried through the United States mail.

The first American publisher of valentine cards was printer and artist Esther Howland. The price of her elaborate lace cards of the 1870s ranged from five dollars to ten dollars, with some selling for as much as 35 dollars.

Since that time, the valentine card business has flourished. With the exception of Christmas, Americans exchange more cards on Valentine's Day than at any other time of the year.

Do Ghanaians celebrate Valentine Day because they want to promote immorality, or they want to share love or better still celebrate St Valentine's boldness to promote marriage or the Church's holy day? If you are thinking of sending a valentine card to a love one this valentine season then it is equally good to know why you are doing it.