Valentine's Day

Jon and I had a splendid day, even by iguana standards. After our afternoon drive to Niles, we got ready for dinner at Anna Maria Pastaria. It's a little Italian restaurant on the corner of Clark and Montrose owned by my colleague's family. The food was good and the atmosphere pleasant. Before dessert came, I offered Jon a special valentine's day treat: A fruit roll-up. But it wasn't just any fruit roll-up. It was a customized valentine's day fruit roll-up with our picture on it. Yep, I'm a big dork.

After returning home, we took a food coma nap before our friends Rich and Christy joined us for a few rounds of Apples to Apples followed by a lengthy acoustic sing-along. Rich asked us if we knew how Valentine's Day got started. Well, according to National Geographic:

The lovers' holiday traces its roots to raucous annual Roman festivals where men stripped naked, grabbed goat- or dog-skin whips, and spanked young maidens in hopes of increasing their fertility, said classics professor Noel Lenski of the University of Colorado at Boulder.

The annual pagan celebration, called Lupercalia, was held every year on February 15 and remained wildly popular well into the fifth century A.D.—at least 150 years after Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire.

"It is clearly a very popular thing, even in an environment where the Christians are trying to close it down," Lenski said. "So there's reason to think that the Christians might instead have said, OK, we'll just call this a Christian festival."

The church pegged the festival to the legend of St. Valentine.

According to the story, in the third century A.D. Roman Emperor Claudius II, seeking to bolster his army, forbade young men to marry. Valentine, it is said, flouted the ban, performing marriages in secret.

For his defiance, Valentine was executed in A.D. 270—on February 14, the story goes.

While it's not known whether the legend is true, Lenski said, "it may be a convenient explanation for a Christian version of what happened at Lupercalia."