Feb 14

St. Valentine is believed to have been a Roman priest who was slain on this day in the year 270. How he became the patron saint of lovers remains a mystery, but one theory is that the Church used the day of St. Valentine's martyrdom in an attempt to Christianize the old Roman Lupercama, a pagan festival held around the middle of February. Part of the ancient ceremony was for participating boys to pull participating girl's names from a box. Couples would thus be paired off until the following year. The Church substituted saint's names for girl's names, in the hope that the participant would model his life after the saint whose name he drew. But by the sixteenth century, it was once again girl's names that ended up in the box. Eventually the custom of sending anonymous cards or messages to those one admired became the accepted way of celebrating St. Valentine's Day.