Valentine’s Day is here: that strange hodgepodge of Hollywood, chocolate, Portishead and dinner plans that seems to be cool one year, and deeply uncool the next.
Valentine’s Day is the world’s biggest day for chocolate sales, but at Soma nothing much changes. While all the world is out buying confectionery and flowers, we’ll be home early on Friday, on the couch or at the beach, smooching our way into the weekend.
We actually weren’t planning to write an email about Valentine’s Day at all. We did a little giveaway last week, and thought that would be enough.
But the responses we got to the giveaway touched us, and made us suspect that there might be more to Valentine’s Day than we are accustomed to think.
Valentine’s Day is named after St Valentine, a Christian saint who lived in the third century AD. Little is known for sure about St Valentine - one story says that performed weddings for young couples forbidden to marry; another that during his imprisonment he befriended the jailor’s daughter, and at his death left a note for her, signed, “your Valentine.” He was executed on the 14th of February, 269 AD.
Mid-February was the time of Lupercalia in Rome, one of the empire’s oldest festivals. In it, priests sacrificed a goat, flayed the hide, and gave strips of it to almost-nude young men, who ran through the streets, lightly slapping young women with their strips of goat skin.
It was thought that this ritual spanking purified the women so that they could bear children safely. The name ‘February’ probably comes from the Latin word ‘februa,’ which means purification and was closely associated with Lupercalia.
As Lupercalia fell out of fashion in the fifth century, it was replaced by St Valentine’s Day. In the fourteenth century, Geoffrey Chaucer led a movement to popularise Valentine’s Day as a celebration of romance, pointing out that birds start mating around the fourteenth of February in England.
The custom of writing a note to your Valentine emerged in England sometime during the 16th Century. Valentine’s Day gained popularity in Europe after that, then in America. Esther Howland, considered the mother of the American Valentine, mass-produced elaborate Valentine’s Day cards in the 1840s. In the 1860s, Richard Cadbury started selling chocolate in heart-shaped boxes (the solid chocolate we know today had only been around for a few years then). Other confectioners, then florists, then jewellers jumped on the Valentine wagon, until Valentine’s Day became the commercial extravaganza it is today: in America alone, $20 billion is spent on Valentine’s Day each year.
This is the Valentine’s Day we have come to know, but it was not the Valentine’s Day you described in our giveaway.
We asked you to send the name of someone you’d love to receive a surprise Soma sample pack, with a note saying “from your secret admirer. Happy Valentine’s.”
Those packages are already arriving at their destinations (we drew the names in a lottery), but we’re still reading through the submissions. What strikes us is how much love we read in the words you sent: you didn’t ask for a flattering gift for a high-school crush; you wanted a pick-me-up for a friend having a rough time, a vote of appreciation for someone you’ve loved forever, a way to repay someone who has shown you amazing kindness, a gift to heal a broken bond, a treat to light up a familiar pair of eyes.
It has us thinking that maybe Valentine’s Day isn’t just about oysters and lingerie, but might be a day for making a loving gesture.
Maybe it’s the day when we can pluck up the courage to do the thing we know we’ll regret if we do not do it - sending mum a bunch of flowers, sitting on the porch with dad, sending a silly gift to a friend, taking ourselves dancing, looking the people we love in the eye and saying “I love you,” giving little kisses, writing a love note, singing a song, or waking someone up at 5:30 with two mugs of Soma, saying, “It’s time we caught the sunrise together.”
We hope your Valentine’s Day is a day full of love and magic,
With vanilla and honey,
