Valen-fuckin-times Day

Aunt Esther doesn’t know the hell she hath wroth when in 1850 she sold the first Valentine’s Day card in the United States.  It started an entire industry geared to add stress and anxiety to hard working gentlemen feeling obligated to be romantic on at least this one day every year.

Miss Esther Howland is given credit for sending the first Valentine cards in the USA.  Perhaps it was simply an attempt by a lovelorn woman who was cursed with an eerie resemblance to John Goodman to get a date via direct mail. Remember, this was long before the days of internet dating sites and Box Socials.

Perhaps too, it could have been the work of an evil reincarnation of the original Saint Valentine, returning to cast burden upon the ancestors of those who brutally murdered him.

Yes, I said murder.  As a young Bonehead, I too was cursed.  Cursed to be a husky little boy with a bad haircut in elementary school.  No – I never got a whole lot of cutesy little Valentine’s Day cards as a kid, so I had lots of free time to research the history and traditions of Valentine’s day while other little guys with Brylcreem hairdo’s and Levi’s jeans got to sit under the shade tree and see little Debbie Stillman’s underpants.  Now its payback time – and I’m the one under the tree, and with a whole bunch of Long Island brides to be this time!  Don’t worry though, no need to show me your under…(LINE AGGRESSIVELY REMOVED BY SITE EDITOR).

So Valentine’s Day is supposed to be this romantic day based on love, laughter and sex.  Did you know that the namesake of the day was really Saint Valentine.  Long before he was canonized as a Saint – he was a simple Priest.  Around 270 AD Tony Valentine was a holy priest in Rome, who, with St. Marius and his family, assisted the martyrs in the persecution under Claudius the second. Claudius had determined that married men made poor soldiers. So he banned marriage from his empire. But Valentine would secretly marry young men that came to him. When Claudius found out about Valentine, he first tried to convert him to paganism. But Valentine reversed the strategy, trying instead to convert Claudius.

Fool!

Valentine was apprehended and incarcerated. During the days that Valentine was imprisoned, he fell in love with the blind daughter of his jailer. His love for her, and his great faith, managed to miraculously heal her from her blindness before his death. Before he was taken to his death, he signed a farewell message to her, “From your Valentine.” The phrase has been used on his day ever since. Since the emperor and the courts of Rome, who, on finding all his promises to make him renounce his faith ineffectual, commended him to be beaten with clubs, stones, and afterwards, to be beheaded.  The Romans lopped off his head on…you guessed it, February 14.

Now, had he been beaten to death with either heart shaped boxes of chocolate or a nagging wife, I might understand some of the traditions as to how this holiday got started.  Beaten to death with clubs – perhaps they were adorned with red hearts and pink flowers?

Seems though that the legend of the priest named Valentine carried forward.  It became a tradition for the men to give the ones they admired handwritten messages of affection, containing Valentine’s name. And sometime shortly after the Black Plague, the first Valentine card grew out of this practice. The first true Valentine card was sent in 1415 by Charles, duke of Orleans, to his wife.

He was imprisoned in the Tower of London at the time. She reportedly withheld her favors on their next congical visit as he forgot to include roses or candy with the card.

So Duke Chuck’s wife was the first Valentine’s Day bride to be pissed off by her husband.  Starting another long line of time honored Valentine’s Day traditions.  Guys just can’t get the right gifts.

Sometimes though, just showing up is enough.  I’ll bet there were seven pissed off young ladies in Chicago on Valentine’s Day night in 1929.  That was of course, the night of the famous Valentine’s Day Massacre.  On a brisk February 14th evening in North Chicago, seven well-dressed men were found riddled with bullets inside the S.M.C Cartage Co. garage. They had been lined up against a wall, with their backs to their executioners and shot to death. With the exception of a certain Dr.Schwimmer these men were mobsters working under the leadership of gangster and bootlegger, “Bugs” Moran.

Within a few seconds, while staring at a bare brick wall, these seven men had become a part of Valentine’s Day history: the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.  Little did they know then as they stood unaware of their pending immediate doom, that their misfortune would create a cliché all boneheaded gift giving guys would endure as the tales of their feeble attempts at romance elicit mock and gossip from their romance starved wives, girlfriends, fiancés and pen pals.

Legend has it that Al Capone – the top mobster in the Windy City that year was behind the rub out.  Bugs Moran accused him right away saying that only Al Capone kills that way.  Capone of course denied the accusations throughout the remainder of his days.  His alibi – he was in Miami at the time, entertaining his Valentine with chocolates, martinis and lies about his hidden vault.

It was over 60 years later that his alibi was proven true as the grandson of Capone’s 1929 Valentine’s Day sweetheart Carmella Rivera went on national television to expose nothing more than an old bottle hidden in Al Capone’s secret vault.

Seems that everyone has a special Valentine’s Day Massacre that they hold near and dear to their hearts.  For some, it’s a mob hit.  For others, it’s a box of half eaten chocolates or a Necco Sweetheart candy with the message “Bite Me” or “Not If You Were the Last of Your Gender”.  In my family – we laugh over our prescription mood modifiers and cheap red wine about the fact that my dad was born on the same day as the Valentine’s Day Massacre.

There’s really very little connection, other than the fact that he’s Sicilian, favors pinstriped suits and cash and gives really bad haircuts.