St. Valentine's Day

Love plays so important role in our life that people created a holiday to celebrate their love. This holiday is St. Valentine's Day. This day gives the possibility to declare your love to the person as well as to give him/her present.

Of course real love doesn't need any holiday to declare love but St. Valentine's Day can really become the pretext.

The history of this holiday is rather interesting and tells us the life of the priest Valentine who lived in Roman Empire. There are several variants of his life because there are no exact and authentic documents about his life.

According to one of the variants this priest was helping to the couples, helped to write declarations of love, made piece, presented flowers etc. But he was put to prison because it was not allowed for the roman soldiers to get married. But this priest secretly helped them to get married.

While staying in the prison Valentine fell in love with the blind daughter of his executioner and healed her. According to another variant, executioner asked the priest to heal his daughter and she fell in love with him. Anyway before execution he left a card for her and wrote "Your Valentine". So that was the history of cards given by lovers on St. Valentine's Day. The execution of this priest happened the same day when the holiday to honour the goddess of love was held. And later it became the day of spring.

There is also another variant of history of the appearance of cards sent on this holiday. Some people say that these were the cards of one of the prisoners that wrote love messages to his wife because he was getting bored in prison. These cards were especially famous during the 19th century and nowadays are usual for the holiday of St. Valentine's Day.

The traditional symbol of this day is red roses that appeared according to the ancient legend thanks to the Greece goddess of love and beauty. Aphrodite hurrying for a date stepped on the bush of white roses, and her blood coloured it into the red ones.

Other traditional symbols are red hearts, different flowers, birds kissing and of course a Cupid with arrows and bow.

The traditional cards with poems are sent during this holiday.

Every nation celebrates it its own way. In such a way Japanese give presents on this holiday only to men while in Great Britain presents are given to everybody even to neighbours and friends.

This holiday brings pleasure to people who are in love with each other. They receive another pretext to celebrate their relations and their love. And if it makes them feel better, why not?

But it is an awful holiday for single people and people who feel unrequited love because it makes them feel lonely and unnecessary. This is also a period of depression for such people.