With the infectious pink hearts and disgusting candies, we all know how unavoidable Valentine’s Day is.
Both single and dating populations alike dread the fateful day where we must sacrifice our hard-earned cash to some saint who bids us to buy cheap gifts and expensive candy for our significant others.
Valentine’s Day is nothing but a holiday built for couples to fawn over each other.
Social norms dictate that everyone should have someone to call their Valentine.
This would be a good idea, but with the constant reminders about this pink and lovely holiday single people feel as if they’re left out of the celebration.
This could lead to binge drinking and one night stands with regrettable people. Even children are targeted with this frilly attitude.
Everyone can recall sitting around in their elementary school classroom and handing out Valentine’s Day cards to every single boy and girl in class.
Sure, we were all getting free candy and cute cards with our favorite characters on them but what did we really learn in the process?
There was always one kid out of every class that got left out of the bunch, be it because there weren’t enough cards or because they weren’t liked.
This bred the idea in our minds that being alone for this one day out of the year was a sin.
Let’s look back at the true roots of Valentine’s Day and see how far we’ve come.
In actuality, we don’t know who this particular Saint Valentine is.
There are at least three saints who are named Valentine and all three were martyrs.
In one legend, Saint Valentine was a Catholic priest who believed in love.
When Emperor Claudius II outlawed the marriage of young men, the priest kept marrying them with their loves.
Although these marriages were performed in secret, Valentine was found out and sentenced to death.
Another legend reports that Valentine was a martyr who helped Christians escape harsh prisons.
He was eventually caught and thrown into jail, himself. He fell in love with a woman who might have been the jailor’s daughter.
According to this legend, Valentine himself was the first one to give out these small greetings.
Upon his execution, he slipped a note to his lover that was signed, “From your Valentine.”
Even the celebrations were a far cry from what we’re used to.
According to the History channel, pagans used February for fertility rituals that started with sacrifices.
Sacrifices were both goat and dog for religious purposes.
The goat hide would be stripped and dipped in sacrificial blood and then taken to the streets where they would slap women and crops with the bloodied hide for fertility.
The women then put all of their names in a large urn and the city’s bachelors would pick a name and spend a whole year with this woman.
But sadly, society has frowned upon slapping girls with bloodied skins so we decided to hand out candy instead.
Kristne Mabry
Features Editor