Valentine’s day is known as the day of love, but it was not always like that. The origin of valentine’s day is hard to pinpoint. But many historians believe one place it originated from was the pagan holiday Lupercalia. During this day they celebrated fertility some of the ways they did this was men would strip naked and sacrifice an animal. They would then take the hide of the sacrificed animal and give it to young men to whip young women they did this because it supposably promoted fertility. This stood to be a very popular holiday over 100 years after Christianity became legal in the roman empire. This all changed during the late 5th century when pope Gelasius came to the position of power and banned the holiday. The catholic church not to long after the pope banned Lupercalia declared that February 14th be a day of feasts to celebrate the martyred saint valentine. Although this holiday very likely sprouted the idea of valentine’s day historians believe that Valentine’s Day didn’t become a romantic day until probably another one thousand years later after the holiday of Lupercalia. The origin of the Valentine’s Day we celebrate today is not for sure known but some historians have theories about how it started for example some historians argue that Valentine’s Day was the result of poet Geoffery Chaucer where in his poem the “parliament of foules” he linked Valentine’s Day to romance other poets including Shakespear also started associating Valentine’s Day with love. Another possibility is that in Europe birds start mating around the time of valentines. While these are just some of the possibilities as to why we celebrate Valentine’s Day the way we do there are still many different theories on how the valentines we celebrate presently came to be
