Valentine’s Day was not romantic to begin with and certainly not commercial.
Donna Ray, professor of Western religions, said at least three saints are commonly known as Valentine. In the Roman Empire, they were called Valentinus, she said.
“There are at least three Valentines whose stories, over time, have gotten conflated, so aspects of different stories have been merged together,” she said.
Some legends say Saint Valentine was a priest, and others say he was a physician as well. In the physician tale, he treats a jailer’s blind daughter with a tincture. The daughter’s sight is not cured, but she continues to return to Saint Valentine. She befriends him and sometimes accompanies him while he picks herbs; she picks yellow crocuses.
Because Christianity was illegal at the time, Ray said Saint Valentine was imprisoned. He was kept by the jailer whose daughter he had been treating. Saint Valentine sent the daughter a token of his affection before he was put to death.
“He wrote her a letter on a piece of parchment and rolled it up. He put a yellow crocus inside and signed it, ‘From your Valentine,’ supposedly,” Ray said. “Then he gave it to the jailer, who delivered it to his daughter, and when she opened it up, the yellow crocus fell out, and she was miraculously given her sight back.”
This is where the tradition of giving cards, commonly known as Valentines, comes from.
But Ray said it was Geoffrey Chaucer who made the gesture a romantic one.
“It wasn’t until the 14th century with Chaucer and his ‘Parliament of Fouls.’ He mentions Valentine’s Day and connects it with the birds’ mating season and having babies,” she said. “That’s really the first instance in which Valentine’s Day is given romantic connotations.”
Adam Bubb, professor of American studies, said 1850 marked the holiday’s shift from a religious to commercial holiday. This is when Esther Howland started producing Valentine cards on a mass scale.
“When she set it up, it was in Massachusetts and was basically this small assembly-line process. Friends and family helped her make cards,” he said. “Then it became a pretty big industry.”
In 1858, “penny dreadfuls,” or insult cards, were also made for the holiday, Bubb said.
“It was the opposite of a Valentine’s Day card. It was an insult card, and it was kind of popular because they were meant as a joke,” he said.
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At this time, Bubb said physicians gave patients chocolate to treat ailments such as broken hearts. Because it is also historically known as an aphrodisiac, Bubb said chocolate soon became associated with Valentine’s Day.
“The whole idea behind that was doctors gave them to a lot of patients who were sick, so it kind of morphed into a thing that was viewed as a gesture of goodwill,” he said.
In 1861, Richard Cadbury created the heart-shaped chocolates box. By the 1880s, most Valentine’s Day cards were mass-produced. In 1902, NECCO began making candy hearts. Bubb said the phrases they print on these have changed to reflect modern times.
“They’ve changed them in the last few years just to keep up with pop culture, so some of them will say, ‘text me,’ or little different things that go along with modern slang.”
In 1907, Hershey’s created chocolate kisses. They were so named because factory workers thought the machine looked like a pair of lips, Bubb said.
In 1969, the Roman Catholic Church took the holiday off its calendar. It made the decision because the holiday’s origins are uncertain. This officially made it a commercial rather than religious holiday, Ray said. The jewelry industry joined the candy and card industries during the ‘80s in promoting the holiday, Bubb said.
