Today we ask the question...what is it with Valentine's Day?
I looked up the history of V Day on the net and found that no one actually knows who the heck St. Valentine was. He's either A) a priest who performed secret marriages for young lovers when the evil emperor decided that single men made better soldiers and outlawed marriage, B) a guy who helped release tortured prisoners from jail or C) a guy who while in prison fell in love with the jailor's daughter and sent her a letter before his death, signing it "From your Valentine". Some even believe that all three were the same person.
So anyway, when this Valentine's Day Festival started happening it was originally a festival of fertility and some pretty weird crap went down. Priests would sacrifice a goat, for fertility and all the young men would slice up the goat's hide into strips, dip them in the sacrificial blood and take to the streets, gently slapping both women and fields of crops with the goathide. What the heck? If someone slapped me with a piece of bloody goat butt I wouldn't find that romantic at all...call me crazy. After all the slapping occured, later in the day, all the ladies would put their names into a big urn and they'd have a round of pairing up the "bachelors" and their "chosen women", which would often end in marriage. You'd want to be feeling lucky that day.
And that's the story kids...somehow from there the goathide slapping was replaced with greeting cards and bouquets of flowers. It is a strange world that we live in.
So if you're feeling a little low today cos you didn't receive a text from that guy or your boyfriend didn't get you a nice bunch of roses, just sit back and appreciate that you weren't slapped with a piece of goathide this morning on the way to work.
