The Origin Of Providing Valentine S Day Cards

The Origin Of Providing Valentine S Day Cards

Traditionally, mid-February was a Roman time to meet and court potential mates. The Lupercian lottery (beneath penalty of mortal sin), Roman young guys did institute the custom of offering women 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 although he was a prisoner in the Tower of London. It's now inside the British Museum.

Within 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 turn into wayward and needed models to emulate. All the same, this lottery was significantly less effective and shorter-lived than Pope Gelasius’s. And instead of disappearing, cards proliferated and became a great deal more decorative.

Cupid, the naked cherub armed with arrows dipped in like potion, beame a well-liked valentine image. He was linked together with the holiday simply because in Roman mythology he is the son of Venus, goddess of love and beauty.

By the seventeenth century, handmade cards had been oversized and elaborate, while store-bought ones had been smaller sized and costly. 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 producing a restricted quantity of cards with verses and sketches, called “mechanical valentines,” along with a reduction in postal prices inside the next century ushered in the significantly less private but less complicated practice of mailing valentines. That, in turn, produced it possible for the very first time for you to exchange cards anonymously, which is taken because the reason for the sudden look of racy verse in an era otherwise prudishly Victorian.

The burgeoning number of obscene valentines caused many countries to ban the practice of exchanging cards. In Chicago, for example, late within the nineteenth century, the post office rejected some twenty-five thousand cards on the ground that they were not match to become carried by means of the U.S. mail.

The initial American publisher of valentines was printer and artist Esther Howland. Her elaborate lace cards of the 1870s expense from 5 to ten dollars, with some promoting for as much as thirty-five dollars. Considering that that time, the valentine card home business has flourished. Using the exception of Christmas, Americans exchange way more cards on Valentine’s Day than at any other time on the year. Just thinking about it brings memories of red construction paper, and little boxes of heart candies that say ‘Be Mine’!