Happy Valentine’s Day!
The one day of the year where we truly celebrate love. From the sweet innocence of shyly sending your first Valentines card in the school playground, to a couple who have been married for an eternity but still take a moment to mark their love for each other with a card, flowers, a special meal or just an extra special hug.
Valentine’s Day is a very old tradition, but just who is St Valentine? The Jury is out on this and nobody is really sure.
There are many contenders vying for the title of the “true” St Valentine. Many date back to the Roman times with no romantic tales. Instead these Valentines spent years in prison and met gruesome ends at the hands of an executioner.
My favourite tale is that of the Roman Priest, Valentine. When Emperor Claudius II decided that single men made better soldiers he outlawed marriage for young men. Valentine defied Claudius and continued to perform marriages for young lovers in secret.
Whoever the actual St Valentine was, we have sent Valentines greetings for hundreds of years.
The oldest known Valentine, still in existence today, was a poem written in 1415 by the Duke of Orleans, to his wife while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London.
Messages were mostly handwritten until the 1900s when printed cards began to replace written letters. Across the world today an estimated 145 million Valentine’s Day cards will be sent, making Valentine’s Day the second largest card-sending occasion.
Not every country celebrates Valentines day but it is popular here in the UK as well as in the USA, Canada and Australia. In the Philippines, it is the most common wedding anniversary, and mass weddings of hundreds of couples are not uncommon on that date.
Marriage proposals are also popular on Valentine’s Day, in fact nearly 6 million couples get engaged on Valentine’s Day.
That’s a lot of weddings to plan and venues to book!
If you are lucky enough to be one of the 6 million new engaged couples and are looking for help with your big day, why not give me a call or email denise@oaklandscelebrants.co.uk and we can start turning your dream into a reality.
Denise x