Due to my background in classic history, as well as my distaste for most things of Christian influence, paired with my general pessimism, I'm here to write just one of the many available, annually produced, anti-Valentine's Day scriptures. Like most "religious" holiday's celebrated in Western culture, Valentine's day has become a sales holiday to get chocolates and flowers into consumers hands; to fill up restaurants to sell their overly priced prix-fixe menues; to use the extra red construction paper, or candles, or cake decorations, or table clothes one more time before next Christmas; and to make sure every second grader get's their fair share of Necco Valentine's Day Candy Conversation Hearts and "choo-choo choose me" cards promoting romantic love and physical relationships far before puberty but if you look back into the history of the holiday or who exactly St. Valentine was, there are far less Whitman's chocolate heart samplers and personalized talking plush teddy bears than one may imagine.
The Catholic church can't even agree on precisely who St. Valentine was, as there were numerous Valentine's, or as the name implies, people worthy to be attributed to the feast of February 14th. He could have been a priest in Rome, a Bishop in a small town north of Rome, a martyr in some Roman province in Africa, or if you ask me, nobody imparticular. My personal feeling on the subject, is the same as my feeling on most Christian holidays in that it was created for the sole reason of superceding a Roman Pagan holiday. In this case Lupercalia, and in all honesty, I'd much rather celebrate "the Lycaean god, whom the Greeks call Pan and the Romans Lupercus" than a fictitious amalgimation of Christian "saints" who, I'm sure I don't need to remind you, were quite capable of purchasing their sainthood.
The obscurity of St. Valentine's identity implies that much like Christmas and it's Roman Pagan reciprocal Saturnalia, Valentine's Day was most likely a replacement holiday for Lupercalia, a pastoral pagan holiday celebrated between February 13th and February 15th which, as Plutarch notes, "...was anciently celebrated by shepherds, and has also some connection with the Arcadian Lycaea. At this time many of the noble youths and of the magistrates run up and down through the city naked, for sport and laughter striking those they meet with shaggy thongs. And many women of rank also purposely get in their way, and like children at school present their hands to be struck, believing that the pregnant will thus be helped in delivery, and the barren to pregnancy." If you ask me, that sounds like a lot more fun than celebrating someone who may or may not have been martyrd for marrying Christian couples during the time of their greatest persecution with Edible Arrangements or overly priced rose bouquets.
