A lot of my friends (the bitter, single ones) bah humbug Valentine’s Day – or “VD Day,” as some of us like to call it. “It’s a made up holiday! Consumeristic BS foisted upon a hapless public by the greeting card industry.”
Well, duh. So is Thanksgiving, Mother’s Day – even Halloween has cards, now. Let’s be honest. Who wakes up Christmas morning thinking, “I can’t wait to get to church and celebrate the Christ in Christmas!” Who spends Thanksgiving in prayer, as it was established for, rather than spending it in pain, from overeating?
It might be a day of Kay’s Diamond-whoring and chocolate ad nauseum now, but let’s learn a bit more about this scarlet-hued day of remembered romance:
The History Channel (for those of you math majors who might be reading, and don’t want things to get too wordy – or history nerds with a thing for men in armor) has a three-minute, splendid life-action telling of the holiday’s bloody origins (link will open in a new window):
But what’s all this about sex slaves??
Valentine’s Day, like so many Christian holidays, was usurped in the hopes of spreading the Good News:
“We owe our observance of Valentine’s day to the ancient Festival of Lupercalia which celebrated erotic love in honor of the Roman goddess Juno. Some experts say that the name of the month February actually comes from the Latin word “febres”, meaning feverish, as in the word “febrile”. Remember the legend of Romulus and Remus who were raised as infants by a pack of wolves and grew up to be the founders of Rome…well, supposedly all this childrearing occurred in a cave on the hillside which was called “Lupercallus” or “Wolf-Cave” in translation.
The feast days celebrated the founding of Rome, and a pagan priest led the festivities which included his “whipping” all the women to ensure their fertility. Another part of the celebration involved a “lottery” in which the names of the unmarried females names were drawn from a hat (or other suitable container) by the available young males and they were “paired” for a period of time, some say a year. This pairing, of course, being done in honor of Juno, the goddess of love and marriage.”
And speaking of love and marriage, what’s with the fat baby in the diaper, shooting pointy things at people??
“In this case it was the Greek god Eros, the son of Aphrodite, the goddess of romance and beauty, and Ares, the god of war.
Admittedly, Eros was once a bit of a “mamma’s boy” . . . at least until he married Psyche, who managed to make him grow up. As a married man, he had to give up his silly habit of going around shooting everyone with arrows dipped in love potion that made them fall in love with the next person they saw, no matter how ridiculous or impossible the union would be.
Even so, he was a man, a god, and a power to be reckoned with. Today we mostly recognize him as Cupid, that little fat cherub with the bow and arrows, who was once a handsome and manly god.”
One more poetic offering, a many-splendored love song in its adoring simplicity, “Windchimes,” by Tony Hoagland:
She goes out to hang the windchime
in her nightie and her work boots.
It’s six-thirty in the morning
and she’s standing on the plastic ice chest
tiptoe to reach the crossbeam of the porch,
windchime in her left hand,
hammer in her right, the nail
gripped tight between her teeth
but nothing happens next because
she’s trying to figure out
how to switch #1 with #3.
She must have been standing in the kitchen,
coffee in her hand, asleep,
when she heard it—the wind blowing
through the sound the windchime
wasn’t making
because it wasn’t there.
No one, including me, especially anymore believes
till death do us part,
but I can see what I would miss in leaving—
the way her ankles go into the work boots
as she stands on the ice chest;
the problem scrunched into her forehead;
the little kissable mouth
with the nail in it.
“What is love??”
Frustrated poets and love-struck teens have been tearing their hair out for centuries, looking for the answer – an answer, gentle reader, we have been given from the greatest poet of all time:
Love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant, love does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, Love does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
~1 Corinthians 13:4-7~
Happy Valentine’s Day!
