Here is a short history of the known facts regarding how we came to celebrate this wonderful day. For comprehensive information please visit this Wikipedia entry.

Numerous early Christian martyrs were named Valentine. Until 1969, the Catholic Church formally recognized eleven Valentine's Days. The Valentines honored on February 14 are:

• Valentine of Rome (Valentinus presb. m. Romae): a priest in Rome who suffered martyrdom about AD 269 and was buried on the Via Flaminia. His relics are at the Church of Saint Praxed in Rome and at Whitefriar Street Carmelite Church in Dublin, Ireland.
• Valentine of Terni (Valentinus ep. Interamnensis m. Romae): He became bishop of Interamna (modern Terni) about AD 197 and is said to have been killed during the persecution of Emperor Aurelian. He is also buried on the Via Flaminia, but in a different location than Valentine of Rome. His relics are at the Basilica of Saint Valentine in Terni (Basilica di San Valentino).

February fertility festivals
Though popular modern sources link unspecified Graeco-Roman February holidays alleged to be devoted to fertility and love to St Valentine's Day, it has been demonstrated that prior to Chaucer, no links between the Saints named Valentinus and romantic love existed.

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Valentines eCards
Valentines Poems

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Chaucer's love birds
The first recorded association of Valentine's Day with romantic love is in Parlement of Foules (1382) by Geoffrey Chaucer:

" For this was on seynt Volantynys day
Whan euery bryd comyth there to chese [choose] his make [mate]."

This poem was written to honor the first anniversary of the engagement of King Richard II of England to Anne of Bohemia.

The earliest surviving valentine is a fifteenth-century rondeau written by Charles, Duke of Orleans to his "valentined" wife, which commences.

Je suis desja d'amour tanné
Ma tres doulce Valentinée… (Charles d'Orléans, Rondeau VI, lines 1–2)

At the time, the duke was being held in the Tower of London following his capture at the Battle of Agincourt, 1415.

Modern tradition
In American culture, Saint Valentine's Day was remade in the 1840s; as a writer in G.F. Traham's American Monthly observed in 1849,

"Saint Valentine's Day... is becoming,nay it has become, a national holyday."

The reinvention of Saint Valentine's Day in the 1840s has been traced by Leigh Eric Schmidt. In the United States, the first mass-produced valentines of embossed paper lace were produced and sold shortly after 1847 by Esther Howland (1828-1904) of Worcester, Massachusetts. Her father operated a large book and stationery store, and she took her inspiration from an English valentine she had received.

In the second half of the twentieth century, the practice of exchanging cards was extended to all manner of gifts, usually from a man to a woman. Such gifts typically include roses and chocolates. In the 1980s, the diamond industry began to promote Valentine's Day as an occasion for giving jewelry.

The day has come to be associated with a generic platonic greeting of "Happy Valentine's Day." As a joke, Valentine's Day is also referred to as "Singles Awareness Day."

Source: This is an abridged version of the article found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentine%27s_Day

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