Ah, yes! Valentine's Day. A day where you show your appreciation for your significant other and provide them with enough chocolate to kick off early-onset diabetes or enough flowers to spark some major pollen allergies (and sometimes both simultaneously) all in the name of love. So if this is a day dedicated to showing your love and appreciation for your better half, what on earth do you do on the other days of the year? Ignore each other? Valentine's Day has always baffled me. Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of gift-giving and showing appreciation for your significant other, I just don't see why you need an occasion to do it.
Delving back through the ages we find that the name of this annual celebration comes from Saint Valentine, the bishop of Terni. Not much is known about his life, but what is a fact is that he was definitely not considered the patron saint of love. No, the first attachment of romantic love to this particular day was done by Geoffrey Chaucer; poet, writer and all-round weird person. He invented many of the legends currently associated with Valentine's Day and also declared it to be a day of love and romance. In fact, in his poem Parlement of Foules (try saying that 5 times fast) he wrote the following:
For this was on seynt Volantynys day
Whan euery bryd comyth there to chese his make.
Roughly translated this means "For this was on St. Valentine's Day, when every bird cometh there to choose his mate." So the idea of birds hooking up for a bit of fun at the start of spring made him decide to declare this a day of love for all. I'd have been very wary of inviting him around to visit my aviary! So, to sum up, every year millions of people around the world celebrate a day made famous by a fourteenth century poet with a strange thing for mating birds. Think about that while you are munching on your heart-shaped chocolates!
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