Todays is Valentines Day.
Romantics among us, conscious of our sacred obligations in this cynical world, enlist the assistance of Hallmark and florists in an effort to send the right message of devotion to our inamorata.
The day, however, like love itself, is shrouded in mystery.
Some claim it was simply the outgrowth of the pagan holiday Lupercalia, a fertility festival celebrated by the ancient Romans in mid-February. The name comes from the Luperci, an order of Roman priests. On the appointed day, they would gather at the cave where the she-wolf ostensibly suckled and cared for Rome's founders, Romulus and Remus, and sacrifice a goat and a dog, said for some reason to represent fertility and purity, respectively. After dividing the goat's hide into strips and dipping the strips in the dog's blood, the priests then walked Rome's various via and fields slapping welcoming women and crops with the bloody strips. Fertility supposedly enhanced, the women placed their names in a big urn at the end of the day and were paired for the year with the Roman bachelors who picked their names from the urn.
Like many things Roman, Lupercalia died at the hands of a Pope, in this case Gelsius at the end of the 5th century who deemed the holiday "un-Christian". Also like many things Roman, however, the festival was popular with the masses. So the church couldn't just kill it. It had to find a substitute. And thus was born . . .
St. Valentine's Day.
St. Valentine was a martyr.
Or, more accurately, there were a number of St. Valentines who were martyrs.
One was a Catholic priest who performed secret marriages in violation of Emperor Claudius's decree that soldiers remain single. Another was a bishop beheaded by Claudius. A third was a prisoner who fell in love with the girl who regularly visited him in jail and sent her a "From Your Valentine" letter just before he died.
It's not particularly clear which of these St. Valentines the church fathers intended to honor on February 14. And, in truth, the connection between this Feast Day (which is what we Catholics call the days that honor our saints) and our own mid-winter festival of love was for centuries pretty dubious. Though Pope Gelsius is ofen credited with substituting St. Valentine (or one of them) for Lupercalia, that's more a theory than a fact. He definitely outlawed the latter but it's not clear he intended to replace its message with the former.
For that we have to thank Chaucer.
Who appointed "Seynt Valentine's" as the day "whan every foul cometh ther to choose his mate."
For the record, he was talking about the mating habits of . . .
Birds.
Shakespeare, as was often his wont, got a little racey with the day. In Hamlet, Ophelia innocently says "To-morrow is St Valentine's Day,/ All in the morning betime,/ And I a maid at your window./To be your Valentine." Things then get R-rated as she continues: "Then up he rose,/And donn'd his clothes,/And dupp'd the chamber-door,/Let in the maid, that out a maid/ Never departed more."
Once opened, or "dupp'd" as Shakespeare would put it, the door linking the day to romance has never been shut.
Cards became the rage in the 19th century, and in 1868, Cadbury marketed chocolate in a heart shaped box for the first time. In the US today, more than 190 million Valentines Day cards are sent or exchanged, with total expenditures exceeding $18 billion.
And the holiday has also gone global.
Latin America calls it the "Day of Lovers". In China, it's "lovers' festival". In Iran, though the ayatollahs ban it, they have had to fight fire with fire, resurrecting the Persian festival known as Esfandegan, where celebrants on February 17 tell their wives and mothers how much they love them.
Of course, the day has not always produced the orgy of love the saints, poets or free-marketeers (may) have envisioned.
In 1929 in Chicago, it became home to the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, a macabre, sub-machine gun rub-out of seven bootleggers by their Capone-led competitors. One of the victims even survived for three hours, long enough for him to tell the police no one shot him . . .which I guess was his Valentine to Capone. And speaking of organized crime hits, Jimmy Hoffa was actually born on Valentines Day.
This year, though the day is still not over, nothing particularly untoward has happened.
The Justice Department just announced it will not prosecute Andrew McCabe for lying to investigators about a media disclosure regarding the Clinton email contretemps, which is good, mostly because McCabe didn't commit any crime. Trump, who hates McCabe, is now furious, and with hours left in the day, you never know what he'll do before bed time. This comes a day after Attorney General Barr was forced to (finally) tell the President to stop tweeting about Justice Department investigations and cases involving his convicted friends, another good thing in view of the fact that Trump's tweets now have career prosecutors resigning, justifiably convinced that the President is hell bent on destroying DOJ's independence so that it can be turned into his own personal vendetta-machine . . .
With, of course, the power to subpoena.
And indict.
All of this is news.
As -- before it -- was bribing Ukraine's president, impeachment, the Senate trial, the GOP's cowardice, Mitt Romney's courage, the State of the (Dis)union speech, the Mueller report, obstruction, the 16,000 (and counting) lies, the suck-ups to fascist Putin and sundry other authoritarians, generals called "dopes", countries called "shitholes", neo-Nazis called "fine people", the media called the "enemy", the p**y g******g . . .
And the primaries .
Bernie, Pete, Amy.
Biden and Warren.
Iowa, New Hampshire, and Bloomberg in the wing$.
All news.
But not today.
Today is Valentines Day.
My wife prohibited me from buying her a present.
So I did.
Flowers.
And one of those 190 million cards.
The front said "Guess Who Loves You Today!" Inside: "Same Person Who Loves You Every Day, But Today You Get A Card."
Without her, I could not survive the bad news.
Or celebrate the good.
Happy Valentines Day
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