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St. Valentine's Day


The Holidays are behind us. Christmas and New Year's have been celebrated. Now we can get back to the busy rest of life, oh wait.. there are more holidays. Almost a week before Christmas, I went to my local Target store and beheld Valentine's Day decorations and gifts. Granted, it was but one shelf and the Xmas section was still going strong, but subconsciously I realized that the commercialism and marketing departments were already getting people ready for the next big holiday in the new year. They had the New Year's Eve section too, but Valentine's Day?!

The heart of the holydays or holiday (holie is another way to say holy) has been hindered by the commercialism. I know, I sound like broken record. At Christmas I took on the commercialism and now here again the subject returns. My contention is not really with people buying gifts or nice things for holidays, it is that there is no knowledge of the origin and true purpose of the actual day being celebrated. I remarked about Christmas how it is odd that no one notice that Christ's name is in the name of the holiday.

Moving forward to Valentine's Day. The origin and purpose of the holiday is both pagan and Christian. Originally the practice of giving chocolates and hearts was to honor Aphrodite the goddess of love, and to conjure Cupid, her servant who bespells people with arrows in the shape of hearts. Valentine's Day was a Greek festivity that got people in the mood to make love. The Greeks, as many believe today, thought chocolate is an aphrodisiac (interestingly has the name of Aphrodites in it) to make people primed hormonaly to want sex.

The actual name of the holiday, Valentine's did not come until later. The holiday was named as many are after a particular saint. In Rome, there was an emperor who declared marriage to be outlawed, because he believed his soldiers and citizens could be better able to fight if they had not fondness for each other. A Roman Catholic priest named Valentinus seeing young people in love and not following the decree, began to marry people in secret. Eventually, Valentinus was discovered and imprisoned, there he had correspondence of letters with young lovers and that is how we know the story is true. Valentinus was eventually executed for breaking the law. This is where Christian aspect of the holiday came in.


Thus Valentine's Day can be celebrated in two different ways. It can be practiced in the old pagan way of pervasion and promiscuousness which violates our Christian beliefs, or it can be pure and powerful love demonstrated through the commitment of lovers in marriage. Valentine's Day would actually make a great day to marry, because it would be in the spirit of St. Valentine's sacrifice to save love.

I do believe that it is sweet to send a card or something to someone you are keen or like. It can be a great icebreaker or a time to be idiotic and let your heart bear out to the one you love and risk rejection. It is a time when people's minds are on romance (old sense of the word) and the longing for companionship is starkly in the faces of those who are single. However, Valentine's need not be celebrated by only couples. A single person can delight in Jesus Christ and thank Him for the coming day when they shall meet that person to share the holiday with. Until then, singles can think on St. Valentine, who did not have lover or wife, but spent his Valentine's Day trying to bring lovers together in holy matrimony. Maybe the best way to celebrate Valentine's Day is to foster love in others, to show others plutonic love and brotherly love. And if like St. Valentine, you know people who "burn with passion for one another," then suggest that they commemorate the holiday's name sake and marry.

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