I have a spiel I give, when I’m talking about Interfaith issues to the Jewish community, and they get all het up and freaky about Xmas trees.
In short, the spiel goes: Xmas trees are NO MORE CHRISTIAN than a box of store-bought Valentines. NO WORSE than Jack-o-lanterns at Halloween. Do you give your kids a complex over those??? Do you tell them they can’t eat conversation hearts at school?
But I realized today that I’d never actually done any research to back myself up on the Valentine thing. There I was, trying to rob all your kids of their candy, without really knowing anything about this St. Valentine guy.
So, in case you’re interested in whether you’re being a bad Jew, allowing your fella to lick pink frosting off your nipples tonight… here’s what Christianity today has to say on the matter.
Evidently, Valentines Day way predates Jeebus:
Four centuries before Christ, Romans had a day called Lupercalia. Without going too much into it, I'll sum it up as a sexual lottery. Pull names out of a box at random and couple with a young member of the opposite sex. After a year, you get to pick another name.
Yow-ZA!
And really, nobody seems to know who St. Valentine was:
One story is that Valentine was a priest who secretly performed marriages when Emperor Claudius II reportedly forbade marriage (in an effort to ensure he had soldiers without family ties). Another story says that he was a Christian imprisoned for his faith, and cured his jailer's daughter of blindness. The day before his execution (supposedly Feb. 14, 269), he sent a farewell message to the daughter signed "From your Valentine."
And according to the article, since the middle ages, we’ve been sexing up February 14. It’s never really been a religious Christian holiday at all!
So go ahead and get out the pink frosting… and I’ll work on a new spiel…