Valentine’s Day Origins: From Cupid to Chaucer
Valentine’s Day Origins: Fox News spoke to expert Nikki Lewis who deals with love year-round to learn more about the heart-filled holiday. Lewis is co-founder of the BEVY, a bespoke matchmaking service located in New York and California, and explained that while the theories surrounding Valentine’s Day are murky, the stories behind them help contribute to the February 14th holiday that we celebrate today.
Every year for Valentine’s Day, lovers around the world pull out all the stops for their sweetheart.
From the traditional flowers and chocolate to more expensive gifts such as diamonds, the holiday is just as much about spending your hard-earned cash as it is about love.
In fact, this year consumers are anticipated to spend an average of $196.31 and a record total of $27.4 billion, according to data released by the National Retail Federation (NRF).
So if you’re feeling the pressure to get your significant other the perfect gift for V-Day, it’s likely because the commercialization of the holiday is by capitalist design.
The origins of Valentine’s Day becoming a major commercial holiday can apparently be traced back to the United States.
While the practice of gifting your Valentine greeting cards was a centuries-long tradition in England, where the holiday was birthed, it wasn’t until Valentine’s Day was “rejuvenated” across the pond in the mid-19th Century that it saw its commercial boom, according to the Library of Congress.
The Old World celebration was “often forgotten” and “easily neglected” by those in the U.S. Things took a turn in the 1840s when the holiday was transformed into something “not-to-be-missed,” author Leigh Eric Schmidt wrote in his 1995 book “Consumer Rites: The Buying & Selling of American Holidays.” (Text courtesy of Fox News)