The obligatory Holiday entry...
Feb. 14th, 2005 09:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
capri0mniWhen I was in fifth or sixth grade, I remember picking up a slim, inexpensive paperback Kids' history of Valentine's Day. I don't remember much about it, except two things:
One: it came with those cheap, 36 mass valentines for your classmates (Look in the mirror, and you shall see/The Valentine that's meant for me (or something like that... and the back was foiled, to be mirror-like))and:
Two: it had this snazzy bit of info:
Oringinally, Lupercalia [Feb 15], was a day celebrating the fact that the flocks of sheep weren't completely decimated by wolves... For this festival, all 'unattatched' women would put their names on potshards in a bowl, and unattactched men would pick a name blind -- whomever they got would be their "companion" for the day (naturally, there was no mention, in this wee tome, that it was a fertility festival, with nearly naked men running around flogging people with strips of goat hide fresh from the sacrifice). When the Christian Church officials couldn't stop the festival, they tried to convince young men to put saints' names in the bowl, and whichever saint they picked would be their role-model for the year. Well, it's no fun trying to live like a saint all the time, so everyone kept putting women's names on the slips of paper (by this time), and just calling them "Valentine's," since he was the patron saint of marriage.
Hee! I think that must have been one of the first tidbits of conciously subversive knowledge I picked up independantly of my mother (who was a great one for subversiveness) and tucked it away in my brain... As I grew older, I always thought it might be kind of fun to revive that "romance by lottery" custom... even if nothing further came of it, you at least wouldn't be the odd one out in a day of couplehood...
One: it came with those cheap, 36 mass valentines for your classmates (Look in the mirror, and you shall see/The Valentine that's meant for me (or something like that... and the back was foiled, to be mirror-like))and:
Two: it had this snazzy bit of info:
Oringinally, Lupercalia [Feb 15], was a day celebrating the fact that the flocks of sheep weren't completely decimated by wolves... For this festival, all 'unattatched' women would put their names on potshards in a bowl, and unattactched men would pick a name blind -- whomever they got would be their "companion" for the day (naturally, there was no mention, in this wee tome, that it was a fertility festival, with nearly naked men running around flogging people with strips of goat hide fresh from the sacrifice). When the Christian Church officials couldn't stop the festival, they tried to convince young men to put saints' names in the bowl, and whichever saint they picked would be their role-model for the year. Well, it's no fun trying to live like a saint all the time, so everyone kept putting women's names on the slips of paper (by this time), and just calling them "Valentine's," since he was the patron saint of marriage.
Hee! I think that must have been one of the first tidbits of conciously subversive knowledge I picked up independantly of my mother (who was a great one for subversiveness) and tucked it away in my brain... As I grew older, I always thought it might be kind of fun to revive that "romance by lottery" custom... even if nothing further came of it, you at least wouldn't be the odd one out in a day of couplehood...
