G'morning all you Cherubs and Love Birds ~
Happy Valentine's Day to all'a'y'all.
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This is funny: When I volunteered to write the M'oanin' Open Thread for Valentine's Day, I thought, Great! Now I get to write about Saint Valentine ridding the land of snakes. Cool! I started looking for Valentiny-snake pics and video's to post, I'm thinking maybe I can find a clip of working girl Melanie Griffith greetin' cheatin' Alec Baldwin at the bar, "Snake." I start searching and googlin' and D'oh! Never mind. It was Saint Patrick and the snakes. My bad. I have no idea what Saint Valentine did. Valentine's Day arrives like a flock of 'em flying over my head...
If you're not a practicing Catholic, you probably don't know the story of Saint Valentine. There's really not much to tell; very little information exists about what Saint Valentine actually did or did not do. In fact, there's not much information at all about anything from his era, the 3rd century AD. I looked into it. Most scholars think there were several saints named Valentinus, who over time were all rolled into one embellished tale of miracle healings and general Christian suffering and persecution by the Romans. Another story says that Valentinus paid the dowries for two young ladies so that they could be married, thus making him the patron saint of courtly love. I'm sorry to say this was not in support of gay marriage: he gave money to the families of two separate women paying their way into the lives of men who would be their life-long mates for the right price. Ah, the miracle of courtly love. If that story is true, one could say that it was Saint Valentine himself who first commoditized love for his own saint's name-day.
It appears people didn't think much at all about Saint Valentine for over a thousand years, or did not write poems or stories about him at any rate, until in 1382 Geoffrey Chaucer uses his name-day in verse that sounds much like pirate-English. "Here begyneth the Parlement of Foules," (Argh!) he writes, and somewhere in that lengthy poem, Chaucer pens the first mention of "Saint Valentine's Day" to be found in Western literature. It gets just one line:
...For this was on seynt Volantynys day
Whan euery bryd comyth there to chese his make,
Of every kinde, that men thynke may;
And that so huge a noyse gan they make,
That erthe and see, and tree, and every lake
So ful was, that unnethe was ther space
For me to stonde, so ful was al the place...
Oh baby, won't you comyth and chese yer make with me... I think he means that "every bird came there to choose his mate." Thus the first recorded mention of Valentine's Day links courtly love to a mating season for the birds... Another flock of 'em flies overhead...
Chaucer has his brilliant moments, of course. That's why we remember him. The title "Parlement of Foules" could be a play on words, a triple entendre of fouls, fowls and fools, each very appropriate in its way in regard to love. Scholars can't agree on what Chaucer really meant by "Foules." If only he could spell! The verse itself is rather pleasant, nothing foul happening really, no intrigue or vindictiveness, with abundant flocks of mating fowls... or is he playing us all for fools? Fodder for more obligatory academic publication, methinks... It remains a topic of obscure debate. Nonetheless, if you read Parlement of Foules in full, you'll find some real gems of strange archaic English sprinkled liberally within, like fairy dust:
...On every bough the briddes herde I singe,
With voys of aungel in hir armonye,
Som besyed hem hir briddes forth to bringe;
The litel conyes to hir pley gonne hye.
And further al aboute I gan espye
The dredful roo, the buk, the hert and hinde,
Squerels, and bestes smale of gentil kinde.
Ahhhh... Squerels and the bestes smale of gentle kinde... The stuff of love.
I have no idea what most of it means. It just sounds cool. "Som besyed hem hir briddes forth to bringe." Argh, matie!
By the end of the 18th century, a new American nation, along with the rest of the world, still paid very little attention to Valentine's Day. Young men who had no talent for writing poetry could purchase printed collections of love poems appropriate for reading aloud to one's sweetheart. That was about it. Keep in mind that back then, although Ben Franklin's Second Continental Congress established the first U.S. Post Office in 1775, mail service was sporadic at best. You didn't send flowers or a Valentine card. There were no phones or cell towers and (gasp!) no texting, no cars or trucks or trains or planes, few decent roads to speak of, and obviously no email or online social media. People walked or rode by horse or carriage to deliver gifts themselves and spoke face-to-face when they had something to say. They visited one another and entertained themselves. Letters were for taking over to someone's house and reading aloud. No radio or televisions, no movies, no recorded music. You recited love poems to your girlfriend on Valentine's Day, and wrote them yourself if you really wanted to impress her.
Valentine's Day doesn't appear to have been celebrated all that widely until a wealthy Gilded Age businessman in Victorian England printed up and launched a line of Saint Valentine greeting cards in the 1850s that came into popular fashion across the pond. Entrepreneurs of all stripes took it from there, and over time, it went global. When the US Post office started discounting the price of stamps for sending Valentine's Day cards in the late 19th century, you could suddenly afford to send anonymous love notes... and a new market for racy, adults-only greeting cards was born. Perhaps because Saint Valentine's Day was so aggressively marketed and commercialized, and because there was so little information about the Saint himself, the Catholic Church removed Valentinus' name from the General Roman Calendar in 1969. Catholic or not, it's not really a "holy day", per se, but more a staple, annual economic boon for florists, jewelers, greeting card companies, courier services, lingerie boutiques, chocolate and other candy industries, restaurants, hotels, sex toy shops, miniature golf courses, and Las Vegas drive-thru wedding booths.
I remember in grade school we used to buy or make cards to take in for all the kids on Valentine's Day -- yet another way to make growing up in America as awkward as possible. Now there's a marketing success story -- every kid in every grade school in every town in America buying boxes of Valentine's Day cards or the glue and glitter and doilies to make them yourself... that's some market niche. Doilies. I remember we used to buy packages of assorted cards, and picked and chose which ones we'd give to whom. This 1950s era happy-little-plums card, below, is the type I'd give to someone I actually liked, when I was 6 or 7 or 8 years old. Purple is my favorite color. I'd give the ugliest cards to kids I didn't like too much, a cartoon picture of a junk-yard dog saying "Ruff You!" maybe, or a green cartoon alien saying "You're Out of This World!" would go to the bullies and mousy kids. All classmates get a card, when you're little, but you definitely choose the best cards for the kids you like the best... cards with squerels and bestes smale of gentil kinde...
Then as you and your classmates grew up, everyone started weeding out the kids who won't be getting a card... You could visually quantify the popularity of your classmates, the ones with 30 of the best bestes smale cards with glitter and chocolate and candy hearts in their home room pouch, as compared to the mousy kid who got maybe five or six obligatory "You're Out of This World!" sympathy cards from kids who still gave one to everybody. I don't remember when taking Valentines to school just kind of petered out. At some point the parents and teachers got fed up and made it a rule: no more pouches of shame in home room. Kids brought them in anyway -- it turned Valentines at school into some kind of naughty secret. Ooooo, a new taboo... Giving and receiving Valentines got even more awkward as puberty kicked in and a Valentine card or candy or flower meant you had a crush, or someone had a crush on you. An aversion to cooties suddenly became puppy love.
Thwack! Cupid's arrow o' doom.. It was thrilling, or pathetic, or painful, or taken the wrong way, or easy-breezy, or even queazy -- I remember a boy gave me a Valentine's Day rose in the hallway between classes in 10th grade; he tripped right in front of me and kind of thrust the rose at me and then tripped again as he scurried away all red-faced and sweating and mortified...I called "Thank you," after him, and that was the extent of it. Poor guy. We had a large school, maybe 1,800 kids. He never did muster up the courage to talk to me, and I don't even remember his name... Valentine's Day could be oh so adolescent-special, or absolutely devastating (they don't call it a "crush" for nothing).
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Then as adults, we date, we mate, we buy expensive jewelry... lavish or modest, it's still more or less obligatory to do something for Valentine's Day. Some of my girlfriends obsess over having a date, this one night. Can't they just have this one night totally immersed in the fantasy world of romantic love? Without it being stupid or boring or disappointing or creepy? One freaking night? Even some of my married friends still stress about it. One freaking night! Is that too much to ask?
Just be glad if you're not a Japanese woman. Japanese women really get the raw end of the stick on Valentine's Day. In Japan, women are expected to give chocolate to all their male co-workers. It's called "giri-choko", "obligatory chocolate." Talk about wringing the romance out of a cold, wet towel. According to Wikipedia, Valentine's Day in Japan was initially marketed only for foreigners, and the women-only tradition started because of a misinterpreted chocolate advertising campaign that was lost in translation. This one-day obligatory holiday now accounts for half of annual chocolate sales in Japan. Along with giri-choko, women can buy tomo-choko for friends, and honmei-choko for loved ones. They can also buy "chō-giri choko", or cheap, "ultra-obligatory" chocolate for any of their male co-workers they just don't like. Ouch. That's mean, don't you think? Worse than a cartoon alien telling you you're out of this world... "Here's some crappy ultra-cheap chocolate that you and I and everyone else know means I can't stand you."
Ah, Valentine's Day. Some call it S.A.D. or "Singles Awareness Day." For others, it's a dreamy steamy glittery kissy annual primitive love fest. For many, it's obligatory. It can be good, bad, ugly, cute, scary, pathetic, thrilling, or a beautiful thing. I hope yours is beautiful, and thrilling, and cute. I hope you are all "with" someone. I hope your Valentine's Day is everything you want it to be, and then some. May Cupid's arrow strike its mark -- Thwack! -- all you Cherubs and Love Birds, you ultra-aware singles and squerels and bestes smale of gentil kinde...
I leave you with this: still one of the best love songs of all time, sung by the great Ms. Etta James. May we all have our one freaking night of romantic bliss. ~ XXOO ~
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