I just got the following email from a very good friend of mine:

“Happy unimaginative, consumerist-orientated, entirely arbitrary, manipulative and shallow interpretation of a romantic day.”

Funny how the truest things are often the most hilarious isn’t it? Valentine’s Day. Have you ever really stopped to think about the actual concept behind this arbitrary day that we are supposed to shower our loved ones with kitsch approximations of romantic tokens? And did anybody else notice that as soon as most commercial stores took down the plastic Christmas trees and headache inducing tinsel, they brought out the red Styrofoam hearts? Jeez, you’d think that all this talk of an economic recession was just a vicious rumor.

Let’s take a step back and see how all of this actually came about. As with all our sterile traditions, the origin of Valentine’s Day is quite a bit bloodier than expected. Back in the day when Emperor Claudius II was ruling Rome, they were involved in a few very unpopular military campaigns that resulted in large numbers of casualties. Understandably, the young men of Rome were not queuing up to enlist, instead pleading family responsibilities.

To remedy this atrocious situation, good emperor Claudius naturally outlawed all marriages and engagements in Rome. It was then that two men of the cloth, Saint Valentine and Saint Marius stepped in and helped couples to marry in secret. BIG MISTAKE. Saint Valentine was caught, imprisoned and later executed by means of beating and decapitation. Guess what the date was on this auspicious day in history? None other than the 14th of February.

Around this time, it was also the custom to celebrate the Feast of Lupercalia during the month of February. One of the traditions inherent to the Feast of Lupercalia was the ‘love lottery’. According to history, the lives of young girls and boys of the time were strictly separate and the festival represented an opportunity for interaction. The names of all the young girls would be placed in a receptacle, from which the young men would then draw the names of their companions for the duration of the festival. These pairings often lead to long term relationships and marriage.

In a bid to do away with what they considered sinful pagan holidays, the Christian church stepped in a little while later and renamed all the festivals to commemorate their own saints (because if you change something’s name you alter the nature thereof, obviously). Since Saint Valentine was tapped around the time that the festival normally commenced, he had the dubious honour of having a primitive mating ritual named after him. The End.

So, if you are into arranged marriages, decapitation and governmental stupidity by all means buy into the hype and run off to purchase some plush toys and candy. Me? I’m having lunch at a wine farm as part of a Cape Town tour. And the fact that they’re having a Valentine’s Day menu and a jazz band has NOTHING to do with it.