As Valentine’s Day approaches, I started to wonder about the origin of this “Hallmark Holiday”. So I did what anybody with a question like that would do in this day and age. I opened up my internet browser, went to Google, and I searched for “Valentine’s Day History”, then, lo and behold! Someone had taken the time to write a very good article about the history of Valentine’s Day on Wikipidia.
As it turns out the holiday originates from various Christian saints whose names where Valentine. Interestingly enough, none of their martyrdom stories had anything related to romance or love; in fact, the Catholic Church removed the holiday from their calendar because there was no evidence that St. Valentine’s Day had any correlation to a celebration of love at all. The article went further into some other theories as to how the now commercial holiday might have come to represent a celebration of love, romance, and friendship. Among them was a theory that ties the holiday to Greco-Roman pagan celebrations in the month of February devoted to fertility and love called Lupercalia.
What is love? Why is there a need to celebrate love? In my opinion love is an emotion so innate to the human spirit that we can find some sort of representation of it in every part of the world. Here in the U.S. love and romance play a huge role in our society. Now days we have reality shows about love like the Bachelor, we have whole website’s like eharmony or match.com devoted to helping the user find their “soul mate”, Hollywood is always cranking out some sort of romance movie like the one I watched last weekend “When in Rome”.
All of this emphasis on love, romance and finding our other half is awesome, but I ask, what about loving ourselves? What about showing some self love? There is so much focus on loving the other person that we forget about ourselves it seems. Do you ever recall looking in the mirror and telling yourself “I love you!” does it seem awkward to do such a thing? The first few times I did it I couldn’t help but laugh at myself feeling a bit ridiculous; but then it made sense. How can I love someone when I don’t even know how to love myself?
You really don’t have to stand in front of the mirror and proclaim your love to yourself; however, if there is anything I would like you to consider is; how often do you pamper yourself? When was the last time you gave yourself some love; a hug perhaps, told yourself you where awesome, or gave yourself some kudos for achieving something?
In conclusion, the golden rule applies in reverse: do on to yourself what you would like others to do on to you! Go ahead give it a try, you will soon find a big smile on your face, because just as others are filled with happiness when you show them you love them, you will be happy when you show yourself some love, and if you can’t say love…
Wikipidia Valentine’s Day History article