sorry to break your cinnamon heart

It is indeed an interesting herding phenomenon when a specific date on the gregorian calendar becomes a commercialized holiday so ingrained in popular iconography that we overlook its very roots of origin. Instead, we run on automatic to the nearest theme store. Hearts, flowers, chocolates, lingerie and candle light dinners on the eve of the14th of February all characterize our amorous and sensual expressions as 'Valentine's day' tributes to a lover, whether secret or claimed, imaginary or real. And really, it is rather timely for con$umer culture to be inundated with various objects of eros considering the commercial lull between capitalist christmas and the next big hallmark holiday, easter. Gotta keep the spending happening, after all!

Valentine's day is the perfect capitalist bridge between these two money-generating holidays, ensuring continued profit, sales and product turn-over. Credit card companies gloat along with those expensive lover's suite hotels and 5 star seafood (aphrodisiac!) restaurants. The National Retail Federation’s (NRF) 2007 Valentine's Day Consumer Intentions and Actions Survey, (conducted by BIGresearch for NRF), claimed the average consumer spent $119.67 on Valentine's day that year, up from $100.89 in 2006. With 63.4 percent of consumers celebrating the holiday in 2007, the total Valentine's day spending that year reached about $16.90 billion.

Obviously, we have been gullible enough to take the valentine bait hook line and sinker, believing that somehow we too must buysellandspend with aerobic, root-chakra vigour!. We splurge on heart-shaped novelties as victory trophies of our love. We're conditioned to believe that hallmark can say it better than we can, and so we shelve our own spark of creativity for the neatly packaged mono-products which say it all. We buy pounds of slave-labour chocolates from 3rd world countries along with pesticide-poisoned flowers from still poorer nations. The pressure to conform combined with the powerful effects of all the subliminal advertising which arouse our nostalgic sensations all drive the buying impulse toward this end. Whether we like it or not, we start to think in *red and white.

Until 1969, the Vatican formally recognized 11 different Valentine's days. The only two associated with the 14th of February were Valentine of Rome and Valentine of Terni, both between AD 269 and 197 and likely because one of them was BURIED on the Via Flaminia on that day. Neither one of these men, though both were officially martyred, were EVER associated with poetic romanticism or tender love. By the time the 14th century began to attach such sentimentality to a 'Saint Valentine' whatever distinctions previously existed between these two catholic martyrs was entirely lost.

The church decided to revise their calender of saints in 1969 and had these Valentine dudes dropped from the general Roman calender because of the lack of any known history about them. There is, however, a medieval writing by Bede called Legenda Aurea which revealed just a little more about a 'Saint' Valentine. Apparently one of these two Valentine's was executed for refusing to be converted to Roman paganism by Emperor Claudius II. This devout Valentine had instead attempted to convert Claudius II to christianity and was in turn sentenced to death.

While in prison awaiting his execution, Valentine apparently befriended the blind daughter of his jailer and performed some kind of remarkable christian healing on her. There is still no reference in this historical document of any romantic love or passion being expressed by Valentine's character, by nature or even as a displayed affection toward his female prison-friend.

So, as such cold fact morphed into embellished fiction, modern lore began to embroider this original (and tragic, and boring) tale of Valentine into a much different kind of historical myth. Now we see Valentine as a heart-hero, a renegade priest marrying couples in secret because of the Roman ban on marriage, as it was believed that single men made better soldiers of war. In this *bs* version, Emperor Claudius II discovers Valentine's marriage scandal and throws Valentine in jail. As further distortion of the Legenda Aurea goes, Valentine now writes a final note to the jailer's daughter (who has been so fictionalized as to have become his 'beloved')

And this manipulation ultimately becomes the first imaginary "valentine".

Yes, an unadorned note that never really existed from a brave christian man who was about to be executed by Roman pagans for defying the Emperor's orders.

This note-which-never-was simply read:
'F r o m
Y o u r
V a l e n t i n e.'

*the colours red and white are strongly associated with an ancient, traditional pagan celebration which happens 12 days earlier on the calender, at the cross-quarter day between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. It is called Imbolc or Brigid's Day, named after the Goddess Brigit (Breed) who is associated with the hearth fire, poetry, inspiration, and protection. The colours red and white relate to the emerging fertility, power, sexuality and the purity of light in the Goddess and the re-awakening earth.