Tonight's picture was taken around Valentine's Day of 2009. I will never forget that day! Mattie was insistent that I NOT be with him in the child life playroom that day. Instead, he and his art therapists worked on a special valentine's surprise for me. When I was finally invited back to the room, Mattie's art therapist, Jenny, snapped photos of us! Not to mention photos of Mattie sharing his hand crafted cards with me! What I love about this photo was that it captured the way Mattie used to look at me. Ironically I do not have many photos like this, yet Mattie did this often. He would press his nose against mine and look deep into my eyes.
Quote of the day: Today's coronavirus update from Johns Hopkins.
- Number of people diagnosed with the virus: 27,630,443
- Number of people who died from the virus: 485,109
It's not the best Valentine's Day in our household today. As I am under the weather with a sore throat and congestion. This is quite typical for me in February, because for the past three years, I get a sinus infection every February. Nonetheless, it is frustrating to be slowed down on top of the weather and being locked down.
In my inbox this week, I received the article entitled, Grief and Valentine's Day. As I went through the article, they had a list of ideas about how to handle the day. I swear over 50% of the suggestions involved "doing" something, something that involved talking or getting together with other people. Naturally I had to look at when this article was published (2014), because NO ONE on earth is talking about gatherings, doing acts of kindness in person, and so forth today. The Pandemic has changed the WAY WE RELATE TO PEOPLE. Another sad commentary really, that points to how isolated people must feel on an already challenging holiday.
How did we begin celebrating Valentine's Day? Frankly from what I have been reading, there is NO exact answer to this. Some articles date it back to pagan rituals and even executions. However, another story involves the practice of writing love letters to your Valentine. It's said that St. Valentine wrote the first “valentine” greeting to a young girl he tutored and fell in love with while he was imprisoned for the crimes. Before his death, he wrote her a letter signed “From your Valentine," which remains a commonly used phrase to this day.
What do you think of this story? An English professor, Jack B. Oruch, through research, determined that the poet Geoffrey Chaucer linked love with St. Valentine for the first time in his 14th-century works "The Parlement of Foules" and "The Complaint of Mars." Therefore, Oruch claimed that Chaucer invented Valentine's Day as we know it today. (At the time of Chaucer's writing, February 14 also happened to be considered the first day of spring in Britain, because it was the beginning of birds' mating season—perfectly appropriate for a celebration of affection.)
Whether or not Chaucer can be fully credited, it is true that he and fellow writer Shakespeare popularized the amorous associations surrounding the day. Soon, people began penning and exchanging love letters to celebrate Valentine's Day, and by the early 1910s, an American company that would one day become Hallmark began distributing its more official "Valentine's Day cards." Flowers, candy, jewelry, and more followed, and the rest, of course, is history.
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