Today's the day when everyone's thoughts turn to cupids and hearts....a day when we buy candy in heart-shaped boxes and cards covered with hearts and lace.
Though based on an ancient Roman festival, the holiday reached popularity in the Victorian era. In America, the first publisher of valentines was printer and artist Esther Howland. During the 1870s, her elaborate lace cards were purchased by the wealthy, as they cost a minimum of five to thirty-five dollars, a pricey amount for the time.
The oldest surviving love poem is written in a clay tablet from the times of the Sumerians, inventors of writing,
around 3500 B.C. It was unromantically named Istanbul #2461 by the archeologists who unearthed it. But the oldest known Valentines were sent in 1415 A.D. by the Duke of Orleans to his wife while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London. It is still on display in a museum in England.
We romanticize love in all it's forms and that's okay but as Robert Heinlein once said “Love is the condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.”
That, I believe, is the essential definition of Love. What do you think?
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