Forget Candy Conversation Hearts; For Valentine’s Day, get LaMaison’s Coffret Maison Dark and Milk Chocolate
“How do I love thee?” asked Elizabeth Barrett Browning in her “Sonnets from the Portuguese, Sonnetts 43.” “Let me count the ways.”
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Show love to your valentine with a “Classic White Box of Red Persian Buttercups & Green Hydrangeas” from milliondollarroses.com for just $499.
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For your valentine’s sweet toothy, try “LaMaison’s Coffret Maison Dark and Milk Chocolate,” for only $190.
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And finally, a personalized note to your valentine would be “Cue the Kiss,” a movie marquee illuminated sign with your honey’s name, and it will only cost $475 from Uncommongoods.com.
But if you really want to impress the woman of your dreams, buy her the 14k Gold Lunar Ring, “Jewels of the Night,” created by Emilie Shapiro. The ring evokes a moonlit sky with a halo of sapphires cast in place with an ancient Egyptian technique that embeds them in molten, 14-karat recycled gold. And it will set you back just $1,120.
And for the man who has everything, for Valentine’s Day, get him a life size Tyrannosaurus skeleton from hammacher.com. Spanning 40-feet from tail to snout, Stan is a life-size replica fossil skeleton of a Tyrannosaur first unearthed in South Dakota’s Black Hills in 1992. The price tag, $100,000, rather low for a life size Tyrannosaurus skeleton.
This is not your mother’s Valentine Day.
When I was a child, I devoured those tiny, candy Conversation Hearts, inscribed with messages of love and friendship, like “love you,” “miss you,” “be mine,” and in later years, “TTYL” (talk to you later). Nutritious, no; tasty, yes, as the little love candies contain everything bad for you, including sugar, corn syrup, dextrose, glycerin, beef gelatin and tragacanth gum, among other unappealing contents.
And receiving a hand-made, hand-signed Valentine’s card from the second grader I worshiped from afar was more than I could have hoped for even if she had signed the card on her mother’s order.
Love is the universal emotion, the basic human means to show love and Valentine’s Day generates enough profit to make Cupid blush.
The U.S. Greeting Card Association reported that total Valentine’s Day spending topped $18.2 billion in 2017, or more than $136 per person, an increase from $108 per person in 2010. Around 190 million valentines are sent each year in the U.S. When the valentine-exchange cards made in schools are included, the figure goes up to 1 billion valentines.
Hallmark can thank Esther Howland of Worcester, Mass., who, in 1847, made the first mass-produced Valentines of embossed paper lace. Howland was inspired by an English Valentine she had received from a business associate of her father. Since 2001, the Greeting Card Association has been giving an annual “Esther Howland Award for a Greeting Card Visionary.”
The Society of American Florists (SAF) estimates that more than 250 million roses are produced for Valentine’s Day each year. Red roses are the most popular, followed by pink roses, and then white roses.
Americans typically spend $4.1 billion on jewelry each Valentine’s Day.
In 1868, the British chocolate company Cadbury created “Fancy Boxes,” a box decorated in the shape of a heart and filled with chocolates for Valentine’s Day.
To many people Valentine’s Day also is a time to show love to pets, with an estimated $1.189 billion projected to be spent in 2022 on dogs, cats and other assorted two- and four-legged friends.
For those hopeless romantics, here is the rest of Browning’s timeless sonnet.
“I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
or the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, — I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! — and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.”
Geoffrey Chaucer, the 14th Century writer and English poet, made the first recorded association of Valentine’s Day with romantic love when he wrote in 1382 the Parliament of Fowls about a dream vision portraying a parliament for birds to choose their mates.
The earliest surviving valentines in English were in the Paston Letters, written in 1477 by Margery Brewes to her future husband, John Paston, “my right well-beloved Valentine.”
And the most overused, cliched Valentine’s Day poem, “Roses are red” is in Gammer Gurton’s “Garland,” a collection of English nursery rhymes published in London in 1784 by Joseph Johnson. It reads:
“The rose is red, the violet’s blue,
The honey’s sweet, and so are you.
Thou art my love and I am thine;
I drew thee to my Valentine:
The lot was cast and then I drew,
And Fortune said it shou’d be you.”
Valentine’s Day, also called Saint Valentine’s Day or the Feast of Saint Valentine, is celebrated annually on Feb. 14. It originated as a Christian feast day honoring two martyred priests, Valentine of Rome in 269 and Valentine of Terni in 273.
In the 14th and 15th centuries, Valentine’s Day first became associated with romantic love when notions of courtly love grew along with the “lovebirds” of early spring. In 18th-century England, couples expressed their mutual love by giving flowers and confectioneries and sending greeting cards.
The day eventually became a significant cultural, religious, and commercial celebration of romance and love in many regions of the world.
The truth behind Saint Valentine is disputed, but its dark side includes legends of a beheaded priest, jailed bishop, illegal weddings and animal sacrifice all form part of the mystery.
Sometime between 41 and 54 AD., the Roman emperor Claudius outlawed marriage for young men, declaring that single men made better soldiers. Enter Saint Valentine, a Roman priest who performed weddings in secret for desperate couples. Unfortunately for Saint Valentine, Claudius learned of the forbidden weddings and had the saint beheaded.
Another legend has Saint Valentine beheaded for helping Christians escape from Roman prisons. Before he lost his head, Valentine fell in love with a prison guard’s daughter and wrote her a letter signed, “From your Valentine” and centuries later, it was off to the races for Hallmark.
Valentine’s Day also is said by some to be linked with Lupercalia, a bloody, violent and sexually charged ancient pagan festival held in Rome every Feb. 15, when animals were sacrificed and women were randomly matched to ward off evil spirits and infertility. By the end of the 5th century, Lupercalia was outlawed for being “un-Christian” and Pope Gelasius dedicated the day before, Feb. 14, to St. Valentine, love and romance.
Valentine’s Day is also known as International Kiss Day, a practice that originated in the United Kingdom.
Feb. 14 was infamous for another event that had nothing to do with love and everything to do with blood and revenge. That would be the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre when five members of the North Side Gang and two other affiliates were gunned down during the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre on Feb. 14, 1929, at a warehouse at Dickens and Clark in Lincoln Park, Chicago, Ill.
The murders reflected the competition for control of organized crime in the city during Prohibition between the largely Irish North Siders, headed by George “Bugs” Moran, and their largely Italian Chicago Outfit rivals led by Al Capone.
Valentine’s Day would mean nothing without Cupid, the mythical cherubic, winged boy who shoots arrows to make two people fall in love. It is believed that Cupid has wings because lovers are flighty and that he is a boy because love, like children, is irrational. His symbols are the arrow and torch, “because love wounds and inflames the heart.”
Cupid is also sometimes depicted blindfolded because, as Shakespeare said, love is seen with the heart and the mind and not the eyes. Shakespeare wrote about Cupid in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
“Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind
And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.
Nor hath love’s mind of any judgement taste;
Wings and no eyes figure unheedy haste.
And therefore is love said to be a child
Because in choice he is so oft beguiled.”
Cupid had his arrows but he’s no match for the garden snail or slug and his and her love darts, also known as shooting darts or gypsobelum. Love darts are formed and stored by sexually mature animals and are used as part of the sequence of events during courtship, but before actual mating. Prior to copulation, each of the two snails (or slugs) attempts to “shoot” one (or more) darts into the other snail (or slug). The dart is “fired” as a contact shot. It doesn’t exchange sperm but research shows that the dart can strongly favor the reproductive outcome for the snail that is able to lodge a dart in its partner.
In closing, reflect on two of the greatest love poems ever written. the first is “A Red, Red Rose,” by Robert Burns.
“O my Luve is like a red, red rose
That’s newly sprung in June;
O my Luve is like the melody
That’s sweetly played in tune.
So fair art thou, my bonnie lass,
So deep in luve am I;
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
Till a’ the seas gang dry.
Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi’ the sun;
I will love thee still, my dear,
While the sands o’ life shall run.
And fare thee weel, my only luve!
And fare thee weel awhile!
And I will come again, my luve,
Though it were ten thousand mile.”
And none can compare with Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116.
“Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.”
So, happy Valentine’s Day to all, except for Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga. and Rep. Lauren Opal Boebert, R-Colo., who should both develop severe tooth problems and require multiple root canal surgeries.