So, it’s Valentines Day.
In the US the shops are full of cards for lovers to send to on another, or for wannabe lovers, or kids with a crush.
But there’s a new card on the block that frankly turns my stomach. It’s the Valentines card aimed at parents and adults to send to kids. Does nobody else feel the healthy kick of their incest-taboo when they see these cards?
How messed up is that? Well, maybe it should not be such a surprise. This is the country that is so religious in comparison t secular UK and yet its Christians celebrate Halloween with gusto. Most Americans I asked had no idea where Halloween came from. It has made an industry out of divorcing these festivals from their origins and by so doing creates unnerving, ironic and troubling connections.
So, I give you Valetine’s Day, American-style. According to the Greeting Card Association, an estimated one billion valentine cards are sent each year, making Valentine’s Day the second largest card-sending holiday of the year. An estimated 2.6 billion cards are sent for Christmas.
Today is a day ‘incorporated’ by the church hundreds of years ago by canonisation of Valentine, and ‘cleansed’ of it origins as a fertility rite. Prior to St Valentine it was a fertility festival dedicated to Faunus, the Roman god of agriculture, as well as to the Roman founders Romulus and Remus.
Its rituals included love lotteries in Pagan Rome. Young girls’ names were written on slips of paper and thrown into jars to be picked out by the boys. Chooser and chosen would then be partnered for the duration of the Lupercalia festival. Such arbitrary pairings often resulted in lasting relationships. The Catholic Church later substituted the names of dead saints in place of those of flesh-and-blood girls to subvert the lusty Pagan practice.
