When I was in grade school, Valentine’s Day was one of my favorite holidays. There were cards. There was the possibility that your crush actually liked you back. And, there was the chocolate -- so, so much chocolate.
Little did I know that the roots of this holiday bore little-to-no resemblance to my childhood experience of it. We were never taught that Valentine's Day actually originated with an arguably gruesome ancient festival, where there was no chocolate or exchange of cute, red-and-pink cards.
But love it or hate it, those are the types of things we associate with the holiday today. After all, there's a reason why roughly 114 million Valentine’s Day cards are exchanged each year -- it's what's become expected of us. So how the heck did we get from an ancient Roman festival, to a holiday that compels many of us to spend no less than $147 on celebrating it? That story, it turns out, is thousands of years old -- but we'll try to condense it....
Amanda Zantal-Wiener shares the roots of Valentine's Day marketing, and how it wasn't always about cards, flowers, and chocolate.