Tomorrow we celebrate the feast of love

Tomorrow is Saint Valentine’s Day/All in the morning betime/ And I a maid at your window/To be your Valentine.

There are two feasts that we have assimilated from the American regime: Valentine’s Day and Halloween. By coincidence, both feasts are connected to the saints. In the case of Valentine, it is actually an ancient pagan feast that the Romans called Lupercalia that they held to mark the mating season of birds. In his Assembly of Fowls, Geoffrey Chaucer noted this by saying: For this was on Saint Valentine’s Day When every fowl cometh to choose her mate.

The pagan Lupercalia was transformed into Valentine’s Day simply because the day it was celebrated coincided with the feast of Saint Valentine. And here there is another confusing coincidence. There are actually two Saint Valentines, whose feast day falls on February 14. One was a Roman who was imprisoned for helping persecuted Christians. In prison, he became a convert and was said to have restored the eyesight of his jailer’s daughter. Despite this, he was clubbed to death. The other Saint Valentine was the bishop of Terni, who was also martyred a few years later. Jesuit Bollandists assert that these two Valentines were one and the same. Neither of them had any connections with lovers nor courting couples. It was the earliest English settlers who brought Valentine’s to the United States. Governor John Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay colony wrote his wife: "February 14, 1629.

Thou must be my Valentine." Today, it is the most popular American feast next to Christmas. Ironically enough, violent incidents in American history happened in February 14, 1929. That was the slaying of seven gangsters associated with Al Capone in a Chicago garage. The slaying ended Al Capone’s power during the height of Prohibition and is to this day remembered as "The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre."

In the Philippines, Valentine’s is observed almost exclusively by high school and college students. The occasion has not really filtered down to the masses. It is, in short, a celebration that has not been Filipinized. People may celebrate Valentine’s Day, but lovers but no one prays to Saint Valentine for a lover. There are no novenas, churches or towns named after St. Valentine. The celebration is limited to Valentine cards, personal greetings and dates.

A few years ago, a group of businessmen met and they saw Valentine’s Day as a possible opportunity to get people to go out and spend money for gifts, luncheons, dinners or other activities with their prospective mates. They thought that it was one of the answers to the fact that most people are very tight with their money after the Christmas splurge. But it has had very little actual response. And the response was not from young suitors. As a general rule, it was married men that took their wives out to celebrate Valentine’s Day. As we said earlier, the celebration is supposedly for courting couples. Although frankly speaking, we see absolutely nothing wrong for the celebration to extend to all happy marriages. What we are pointing out is the accurate meaning of Valentine, which the dictionary defines as "a greeting card or small gift sent on St. Valentine’s Day" or "a sweetheart chosen on this day." To a happily married couple, every day is Valentine’s Day.