Valentine's Day is a day to share love and chocolates with the special person in your life. Valentine’s Day now is known for the loving spirit in the air, but the stories behind the origin of Valentine's Day are a little twisted. Although most stories behind this love filled day can not actually be pinned to the very source, Ancient Rome can be identified as one of the most recent sources.
It has been suggested that the holiday has origins in Roman which correlates with their festival of Lupercalia, held in mid-February. The festival celebrated the coming of offspring, included fertility rites and also pairing off women to men by lottery. The men sacrificed a goat and a dog, then whipped women with the hides of the animals they had just slain. Young women would actually line up for the men to hit them, believing that this would make them more fertile.
Valentine's Day did not become a holiday celebrated with romance until around the 14th century. According to legends the day has been named after a priest who was martyred by the emperor Cluadius II Gothicus around 270 CE. According to legend, the priest signed a letter “from your Valentine” to his jailer’s daughter, who he had befriended and had somehow healed from blindness.
As the years went on, Valentine’s Day grew to be sweeter as Shakespeare and Chaucer romanticized the holiday in a few of their plays, and eventually the holiday made it to the New World.