Saturday, January 24, 2015

The Origin Of Giving Valentine Day Cards

The Origin Of Giving Valentine S Day Cards

Traditionally, mid-February was a Roman time to meet and court potential mates. The Lupercian lottery (below penalty of mortal sin), Roman young males did institute the custom of supplying females they admired and wished to court handwritten greetings of affection on February 14. The cards acquired St. Valentine’s name.




As Christianity spread, so did the Valentine’s Day card. The earliest extant card was sent in 1415 by Charles, duke of Orleans, to his wife even though he was a prisoner within the Tower of London. It truly is now within the British Museum.

In the sixteenth century, St. Francis de Sales, bishop of Geneva, attempted to expunge the custom of cards and reinstate the lottery of saints’ names. He felt that Christians had become wayward and required models to emulate. Yet, this lottery was less productive and shorter-lived than Pope Gelasius’s. And in lieu of disappearing, cards proliferated and became much more decorative.

Cupid, the naked cherub armed with arrows dipped in love potion, beame a common valentine image. He was related with the holiday for the reason that in Roman mythology he's the son of Venus, goddess of really like and beauty.



By the seventeenth century, handmade cards had been oversized and elaborate, whereas store-bought ones were smaller sized and pricey. In 1797, a British publisher issued ‘The Young Man’s Valentine Writer’, which contained scores of suggested sentimental verses for the young lover unable to compose his own.

Printers had already begun generating a restricted quantity of cards with verses and sketches, referred to as “mechanical valentines,” and also a reduction in postal prices inside the next century ushered in the less private but simpler practice of mailing valentines. That, in turn, created it probable for the first time to exchange cards anonymously, which is taken because the purpose for the sudden appearance of racy verse in an era otherwise prudishly Victorian

The burgeoning number of obscene valentines triggered a few nations to ban the practice of exchanging cards. In Chicago, for instance, late inside the nineteenth century, the post workplace rejected some twenty-five thousand cards on the ground that they were not match to become carried by way of the U.S. mail.

The very first American publisher of valentines was printer and artist Esther Howland. Her elaborate lace cards of the 1870s cost from 5 to ten dollars, with some selling for as much as thirty-five dollars. Because that time, the valentine card small business has flourished. With all the exception of Christmas, Americans exchange far more cards on Valentine’s Day than at any other time from the year. Just pondering about it brings memories of red building paper, and tiny boxes of heart candies that say ‘Be Mine’!

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