14 February is St. Valentine’s Day. This started more than two thousand years ago, as a winter festival, on 15 February. On that day, people asked their gods to give them good fruit and vegetables, and strong animals.
When the Christians came to Britain, they came with a story about a man called Saint Valentine. The story is that Valentine was a Christian who lived in Rome in the third century. The Roman Emperor at the time, Claudius the Second, was not a Christian. Claudius thought that married soldiers did not make good soldiers, so he told his soldiers that they must not marry.
Valentine worked for the church, and one day he helped a soldier who wanted to marry. The emperor said that Valentine had to die because of this, and he sent Valentine to prison. But Valentine fell in love with the daughter of a man who worked there. Just before he died, he sent a note to this woman, and at the end of the note, he wrote: ‘Your Valentine.’ He died on 14 february, so the date of the festival changed from 15 to 14 February and the name changed to Saint Valentine’s Day.
In the early nineteenth century people started to give Valentine’s cards to the person they loved on 14 February. The cards had pictures of bird and flowers on them – perhaps red roses, the flower of love – and inside were words like these:
Roses are red, my love,
Violets are blue.
Sugar is sweet, my love,
But not as sweet as you.
People still send each other Valentine’s cards, but often they do not write their names inside: they just write ‘Be my Valentine’ or ‘From your Valentine’.
Some children give their friends or teachers cards or chocolates. A man will perhaps give red roses to the woman that he loves. A lot of people go out to restaurants for the evening and have dinner for two, and some people think it is a good day to marry.”
