Interesting
13 Awesome Valentine’s Day Facts You Should Know
There’s more to V-Day than flowers and chocolates.
There’s more to Valentine’s Day than just a day of sending flowers and chocolates to your significant other. It’s more than just the perfect occasion to splurge on fancy dinners and romantic staycations. If your knowledge of V-Day is strictly limited to knowing it was named after a saint, then it’s high time that you read up and learn more interesting stuff about highly extravagant annual celebration.
The Romans started it
There are several theories about the origin of Valentine’s day, but one of the most popular ones involves Bishop Valentine performing secret weddings during wartime even when Emperor Claudius II forbade it to happen. So the bishop was eventually caught, put into jail, and executed for this work. It was said that when he was in jail, he wrote a note to the daughter of the jailer, signed “From your Valentine.”
It was once considered bad luck to sign a V-Day card
This was way back during the Victorian days. Now, there are around a billion V-Day cards exchanged annually around the world.
Love letters were written long before Valentine’s Day
The oldest surviving love poem dates back to 3500 B.C. It was written on a clay tablet.
Giving of chocolates was started by the pilgrims
During the time of the first pilgrims in America, giving chocolates to others is very precious indeed because cocoa and sugar were rare back then. Now, more than 35 million heart-shaped boxes of chocolates are sold for V-Day.
The World’s Greatest Lover is NOT Valentino, but Casanova
Because of his name, there are people who mistake Rudolph Valentino as the greatest lover ever. But it’s Giacomo Casanova who holds the distinction, who has seduced more than 100 women in his lifetime.
The heart was once used as a symbol for preventing pregnancies…sort of.
The heart was created in Syrian, Libya in 7th century B.C. It resembles the shape of the seeds of the silphium plant, back then known for preventing pregnancies.
The origin of the XOXO can be traced to medieval times
The symbol became synonymous with the kiss. It was used by people who couldn’t write their names and a kiss mark was added to signify sincerity.
Girls ate bizarre food during V-Day to make them dream of their future lover or mate
It’s not surprising that this was practiced during medieval times.
Red is the best color for roses on V-Day
Red is the most popular rose because it signifies love and passion. Other roses are beautiful, but their colors mean something else. For example, yellow rose means friendship.
Cadbury was the first box of chocolates for Valentine’s Day
Richard Cadbury made it in 1968.
Romeo’s Juliet gets around 1000 letters during V-Day
People flock to the Italian city of Verona (where the famous lovers lived in Shakespeare’s story) and give love letters for Juliet.
Cupid is the God of Desire
He shoots special arrows to make people fall in love.
There are around 220,000 proposals made yearly during Valentine’s Day.
