
Valentine’s Day: a long history of celebrating life and love
Valentine’s Day is here, and if you are feeling uninspired by what to do for the occasion, maybe you can draw some ideas from the ways it was celebrated in the past and how it has evolved over time and across cultures.
You might be right in thinking Valentine’s Day is just another made-up commercial holiday, but did you know that it’s actually a tradition that dates all the way back to Europe's Middle Ages! Of course back then, it was practiced a little differently.
Historians have traced its origins to the ancient Roman festival of Lupercalia, the God of fertility, held yearly on February 15 to welcome the coming of spring and abundance. The festivity included a complex ritual many might consider “savage” today since it involved animal sacrifice, wippings, and a splurging feast with plenty of food and wine. Women and men would also place their names in a large jar, and would then be paired off at random for the entirety of the year.
What’s noteworthy here is the celebration of fertility, or to put it in other words, the potential of life, in tandem with the Earth’s natural cycles. While in most places this connection seems to have gotten lost, in countries like Brazil, Colombia, and Bolivia, it’s still alive and kicking. There Valentine’s Day is celebrated in June and in September, rather than February, precisely to honor the Carnaval festivities, or Pukllay in Quechua. These festivities coincide with the first fruits of the season and is also a time when there is a lot of rain, which they consider helps Mother Earth to nourish these fruits.
Pukllay means “play” (Quechua) and is focused on the idiosyncrasy of the Andean world, linked to work in the field, sowing, ripening of crops and harvesting.
Source: Radio Nacional Perú
In Europe, however, this connection between love and the fertility of Spring got lost over time with the rise of Christianity. It was Canterbury Tales author Geoffrey Chaucer who first explicitly linked the romantic holiday with “love birds.” In his poem The Parliament of Fowls, a large group of birds gather on "Seynt Valentynes day" to choose their mates. Poets and writers followed Chaucer’s lead, and popularized the day with sonnets and tales of courtly love between knights and maidens. This is probably when love poems and letters became a thing!
So when did we start giving chocolate for Valentine’s Day? The pairing of the love holiday with the dark delight of chocolate was a seemingly natural one. Already at the time of the colonial conquest, Bernal Díaz Castillo, chronicler of Hernan Cortéz´s conquest of Mexico, said Moctezuma, the great Aztec emperor was served gold cups "with a certain drink made of cacao, which they said was for success with women." When cacao reached European soil, its reputation for being an aphrodisiac had also travelled with it. Giacomo Casanova called chocolate the "elixir of love" and doctors often prescribed cacao for its potency.
Aztec Emperor Moctezuma was said to drink over 50 cups of cacao brew per day.
Source: Noticonquista
But it wasn’t until 1868 that the connection between chocolate and Valentine’s Day was made explicit and widespread. It was Cadbury who created a “Fancy Box” in the shape of a heart filled with chocolate bonbons for the romantic holiday. Once the chocolates had been eaten, the boxes were kept to store love letters, lockets of hair, and other treasurable memories.
Gradually, the mass commercialization of Valentine’s Day as a romantic holiday as we know it today became virtually a global phenomenon.
But in Latin American countries like Mexico and Ecuador, Valentine’s Day is not exclusively for lovers, it also celebrates friendships! They call it “dia del amor y la amistad” (day of love and friendship). That’s why on this day, in the Dominican Republic and El Salvador friends do a small gift exchange similar to Secret Santa, called amigo secreto (secret friend.).
We can also observe this expansive idea of love for Valentine’s Day in Japan. There particularly women—rather than men–give honmei-choco (true love chocolate) to their love interest, giri-choco (obligation chocolate) for co-workers, tomo-choco for friends, and as of late, jibun-choco for self-love.
So if you think about buying chocolate as a Valentine's gift for your friend, your lover, your co-worker, or yourself, you can consider this amazing historic and cross-cultural connection between love and the celebration of life in all its shapes and sizes.
In keeping with the tradition of celebrating life and love on Earth, we think it’s important to specifically support sustainable chocolate. Why? Because it’s made with cacao that’s harvested from farms that use agroforestry, organic and regenerative farming methods that preserve biodiversity and soil health. This is in contrast with most commercial chocolate, which use monoculture systems that rely on deforestation, synthetic fertilizers, and pesticides, which degrade soil and harm biodiversity.
This way your chocolate gift honors, sustains and protects love and life on Earth for all!
Written by: Sol Miranda