Some heartening trivia this Valentine’s Day

THE WOODLANDS, TX – The exact origins of Valentine’s Day are a tad hazy these days. Popular historical opinion is that the holiday is named in honor of at least two different saints, Valentine of Rome and Valentine of Terni. Both were martyred and added to the calendar of Christian saints.

We can, however, pin down the reasons for February 14 to be the annual day selected for celebration of love. February 14 was the day Valentine of Rome was martyred for performing weddings against Emperor Claudius II’s wishes, in 269 AD. The Feast of Saint Valentine was established by Pope Gelasius I on that date in 496 AD to be celebrated in honor of the martyr.

Whether you plan to revel in romance, dive into dating, or leap into a loving relationship today, or if you’d prefer to celebrate it like they do in Finland where today is known as ‘Friends Day’ and more platonic relationships are commemorated, here are a few trivial tidbits to see you through.

• The oldest known valentine still in existence today was a poem written in 1415 by Charles, Duke of Orleans, to his wife while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London following his capture at the Battle of Agincourt against King Henry V.
• You’d think flowers are the number one choice of gift today, but roses come in second place to cards. According to the Greeting Card Association, an estimated one billion cards are exchanged every year on Valentine's Day. And even that’s not a record; Christmas still owns the top card-delivery holiday.
• Speaking of Christmas, December 25 used to be the most popular day for engagements to happen, but in 2020 Valentine’s Day took over the top bended-knee spot when nearly six million couples became betrothed.
• What’s in a name? The scientific name for chocolate is Theobroma cacao. It’s no coincidence that “Theobroma” is Latin for “food of the gods” (for those thinking Ambrosia, that’s Greek).
• While the name ‘Cadbury’ is more associated with Easter when it comes to chocolates (the bunny commercials have been going for decades), you can thank Richard Cadbury who invented the first heart-shaped Valentine's Day candy box and developed a line of heart-shaped chocolates in 1868.
• We’ve all quoted the first two lines ‘Roses are red, violets are blue’ and then run rampant with a million different variations, but the first iteration of this can be traced as far back to 1590 by Sir Edmund Spense and later in 1784 made famous by Gammer Gurton's Garland: “The rose is red, the violet’s blue, The honey’s sweet, and so are you.” The most ‘serious’ variation came in the form of the poem ‘How Roses Became Red,’ written in 1891 by Robert Herrick.

While Valentine’s Day hasn’t been all roses and candy for some throughout history – just ask seven members of Chicago’s North Side Gang in 1929 – other fun things have happened on this day; notably the 1876 patent application that Alexander Graham Bell filed for his telephone, and not unironically the date when Sir Alexander Fleming first introduced the world to the wonders of penicillin in1929.