It's that time of year again, where couples buy each other heart-shaped stuffed animals and flowers, and the singles look for any way to avoid the holiday that points out their loneliness.
Yes, it's Valentines season. And maybe it's not your favorite holiday, but it certainly might be for the store down the street selling all those heart shaped stuffed animals.
But if you know anything about the history of Valentines Day, you'll know that it started out very much different than the consumerist holiday it is now (but let's be honest, what holiday isn't centered around consumerism these days).
The earliest "Valentines Days" go back to the Romans celebrating a feast by sacrificing a goat and a dog, then whipping women with the hides of the animals they had just slain.
But this year, according to the National Retail Federation, 54.7 percent of U.S. adults planned to celebrate Valentine’s Day by engaging in some form of buying stuff.
So how did we go from whipping women with dead animal skin, to the hearts, flowers, chocolates and anything else we associate with Valentines today?
And if you read the headline of this post, you already know the answer: the media (or at least this is what made it become so widespread).
The romanticization of the holiday came about because of writers like Shakespeare and Chaucer.
The sweeter romantic traditions originated in fourteenth-century France and England with the belief that on February 14, birds begin to mate. In Chaucer's The Parliament of Foules we read:
For this was sent on Seynt Valentyne's day Whan every foul cometh ther to choose his mate.
And Shakespeare wrote about Valentines day as well in his play, A Midsummer Night's Dream:
To-morrow is Saint Valentine's day, All in the morning betime, And I a maid at your window, To be your Valentine.
Giving hand written cards to your "valentine" soon became a gesture of love during the Middle Ages, and the tradition eventually spread to the New World, where the Industrial Revolution capitalized on the holiday. Now, people no longer had to hand-make their gifts--they could just buy them from the store.
And, of course, the media followed suit with ads and Valentines-centered content.
But the holiday keeps evolving as new traditions spread through media.
One of the most recent additions to Valentines Day is Galentines Day, which started a a fictional concept on the TV show Parks and Recreation.
What new Valentines traditions are you seeing in the media today?
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