Modern-day holidays tend to get a bad rap for being too commercialized. People feel that the good meaning of the holiday gets drowned out by the fact that businesses are willing to manipulate these feelings to make a profit.
Valentine’s Day suffers from this like any other holiday, but probably even worse. For example, 52% of Americans celebrate Valentine’s Day. That doesn’t sound so bad, until you start comparing it with other holidays.
Comparatively, 70% celebrate Halloween, 79% celebrate Easter, nearly 90% celebrate Thanksgiving, and Christmas reigns supreme at 93%. Goodness, even St. Patrick’s Day has about 54% of Americans celebrating it! (Why, though? How did it come to be celebrated at all?)
Of all the histories I’ve gone into as far as holidays go, Valentine’s might have the vaguest of them all, with so many uncertainties that historians do not know what to make of it. St. Valentine, the namesake of our holiday, has us a bit confused, due to the fact that there is more than one person named Valentine.
One story says that Valentine went against the grain of the Roman Empire, when King Claudius II outlawed marriages between young couples in order to more easily turn the men into soldiers. St. Valentine still helped young people get married, and he was put to death when he was discovered. A similar event was claimed to have happened with a bishop with the same name in a different area.
Another story recounts that St. Valentine was put to death because he tried to help free prisoners. In prison he fell in love with the jailer’s daughter and wrote her the first valentine, but there is no real evidence that this story did, in fact, happen. And because of the uncertainty in these stories, it seems like Valentine’s Day is nothing more than an excuse to sell candy and flowers.
You know what though? I think it’s nice to have an excuse to do things sometimes, and there’s nothing wrong with getting someone you love a card, a box of chocolates or even a bouquet of flowers.
My family has a game we like to play for Valentine’s Day. When it’s dark you sneakily set your gift on the front porch, knock on the door and run. The goal of the game is to try and make it back into the house without getting caught by one of your pursuing valentines. It’s a great time!
Oftentimes this holiday is dismissed or spent sulking because we have a strict expectation of what kind of love valentines should represent, instead of what it is or what it could be, and then in the chaos miss the whole point: Valentine’s is a day to spend with people you love regardless of who it is.
– by Ella Hughes
Feature image caption: Blackbirds falling in love on Valentine’s Day. Courtesy Austin S. (1st Grade) Escalante.
Ella Hughes – Panguitch
Ella Hughes is a junior journalist and editor at The Byway. She has recently graduated from Panguitch High School and has written for The Byway for two years now. Her favorite topics to write about are history as well as present-day local events. In her free time she enjoys singing, watching movies, reading books, and spending time with her family she adores.
Ella is currently serving a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She is serving in the Philippines Tacloban Mission.