So today there is going to be two posts, one for Valentine’s day and one for the bloody good reviews. Yes our precious, you are spoiled.:).
Two Vampire Lovers sharing a drink of Human blood
So little bit of a history on Valentine’s Day. Back during the Roman times, there was the Roman festival of Lupercalia which was a fertility celebration which was celebrated on February 15th. As it was a bloody Pagan Holiday and we know how the Catholics felt about that Pope Gelasius I recast it to be a Christian feast day around 496 AD. He declared that February 14th was to be St. Valentine’s Day.
Wait? So who is this Saint?
This is where it gets a little tricky. Historians have discovered three Saints by the name of Valentine who all happened to have been martyred on February 14th. There was one who was a Priest in Rome. There was another who was a Bishop in Terni, and a third that is obscure and died somewhere in Africa. Historians have tended to believe that the Valentine in question is the priest who was not liked by the Romans. Now the exact reason why he wasn’t liked is lost to the past, but the myth says that either he refused to not marry young bachelors even though the Romans felt they made better soldiers
OR
that he fell in love with the daughter of the jailer after he was imprisoned by Claudius II Circa 270 AD.
Interestingly enough, in 1969 the Christians revised their calendar and had actually removed the Feast Days for Saints, St. Valentine was one of those saints whose day hit the cutting room floor. But since Chaucer and all of those other poets had already started swooning over St. Valentine’s day, it is no surprise that it is still alive and kicking in the form of red nighties and boxes of chocolates.
