Do you know what you are celebrating?

Roses and candy-coated would be the last two adjectives that would appropriately describe the original Valentine's Day.

Everyone has heard some version of the pagan folklore surrounding the pink and red frothiness that has become Valentine's Day. Like most holidays with pagan roots, sentiments of the early Valentine's Days are not fit for a Hallmark card.

According to Roman mythology, the founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus were raised by a wolf called Lupa. From there rose a holiday called Lupercalia, or “wolf-festival,” allegedly celebrated on Feb. 15.

On this holiday, men would sacrifice a dog or a goat. After the sacrifice, the skin would be cut off of the animal into strips. The men would then run around the city naked, whipping the women with the strips in an act of fertility and purity (Source: “Valentines of the Past,” by Robert Herrick).

Other sources allude to a type of lottery where men would choose the name of a woman whom he would keep as a sexual partner of that year ( www.americancatholic.org).

When Pope Gelasius I learned of this ritual, he decided to eradicate it in the name of Christianity. Keeping the same date, Pope Gelasius decided to dedicate the holiday to saints, having both men and women choose a saint to emulate for a year. It was then decided that St. Valentine would be named the patron saint, thus calling the holiday, St. Valentine's Day ( www.americancatholic.com).

Not much is known about St. Valentine. It is speculated that there may have been several Valentines. Some legends claim that, under the reign of Claudius II, marriage was banned in hopes of creating a superior military of single men. St. Valentine is supposed to have defied the law and married young couples anyways, which resulted in a sentence of death.

This, perhaps, is where Valentine's Day got its “lovey-dovey” nature.

Fast Forward several centuries to the 1840s in Worcester, where a woman named Esther Howland receives a Valentine's Day card from England. It is pretty and frilly, but she believes that she could do a better job, so she re-vamps it. In her attempt to out-do the British cards, Howland single-handedly fashions the commercialized American Valentine's Day (American Heritage, “The Amorous Art of Esther Howland” by Joan P. Kerr).

Several years later, soldiers of the American Civil War are said to have sent love letters and poems from the blood and grime of the battlefields.

With its roots virtually forgotten, elementary-schoolers exchange Valentines in “mail boxes” made of out paper lunch bags. The ever-heinous Vermont Teddy Bears rear their over-priced heads in commercial rig-a-marole; and sticky-sweet imprinted candies and gooey caramels are gnashed to the point of tooth decay. Happy Valentine's Day, or should I say, happy naked animal-skin whipping day.

Vanessa Murray is the calendar and Good News editor for The Item.