More than a Hallmark holiday, Valentine's Day, like Halloween, is rooted in pagan partying.
The lovers' holiday traces its roots to raucous annual Roman festivals where men stripped naked, grabbed goat- or dog-skin whips, and spanked young maidens in hopes of increasing their fertility, said classics professor Noel Lenski of the University of Colorado at Boulder.
The annual pagan celebration, called Lupercalia, was held every year on February 15 and remained wildly popular well into the fifth century A.D.—at least 150 years after Constantine legalized Christianity in the Roman Empire.
Lupercalia was "clearly a very popular thing, even in an environment where the [ancient] Christians are trying to close it down," Lenski said. "So there's reason to think that the Christians might instead have said, OK, we'll just call this a Christian festival."
The church pegged the festival to the legend of St. Valentine.
According to the story, in the third century A.D., Roman Emperor Claudius II, seeking to bolster his army, forbade young men to marry. Valentine, it is said, flouted the ban, performing marriages in secret.
For his defiance, Valentine was executed in A.D. 270—on February 14, the story goes.
While it's not known whether the legend is true, Lenski said, "it may be a convenient explanation for a Christian version of what happened at Lupercalia."
Valentine's Day 2012: A Strengthening Economy?
Today's relatively tame Valentine's Day celebration is big business—the 2012 holiday is expected to generate $17.6 billion in retail sales in the United States. That's up from last year's $15.7 billion, according to an annual survey by the U.S.National Retail Federation (NRF).
The level of "discretionary spending" exhibited by survey results is "a strong indication our economy continues to move in the right direction," federation president Matthew Shay said in a statement.
That is, from the retailers' perspective, the fact that Americans are going shopping for candy, flowers, and jewels is a good sign for the economy.
But behavioral economics professor Dan Ariely said that suggesting that an uptick in Valentine's day spending is a sign of widespread recovery, "is premature, I think."
"There's a question of whether people are compensating," said Ariely of Duke University. "You could say that Valentine's Day is perfectly correlated with other expenditures in life, or you could say that Valentine's Day is compensating for other things."
Ariely, whose books include the bestseller Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape our Decisions, said there's good reason to splurge on Valentine's Day, even in a tough economy.
"If you treat yourself to something on next Thursday, just a random day of the year, there's an issue of whether it becomes a routine," he explained. "But if you splurge only at Valentine's Day, now your spending is more confined."
And spend Valentine's Day celebrants will, according to the retail federation survey. The average U.S. consumer is expected to shell out $126.03 on Valentine's Day gifts, meals, and entertainment—about $10 more per person than in 2011.
Spouses and significant others plan to invest $74.12 on Valentine's Day gifts for their significant other—up from last year's $68.98 average. Pets, however, are getting a little less retail love this year, with average planned spending on animal gifts down 52 cents to $4.52.
Why we go shopping at all on Valentine's Day, Duke's Ariely said, has a lot to do with herd mentality.
"Herds give us a sense of what is normative behavior—not normative in terms of rational but normative in terms of this is how people behave," he said.
On Valentine's Day, the normative behavior is to go out and spend money on things such as chocolate and flowers as an expression of love. So, when we ask ourselves what to do, "the answer is very simple," Ariely said.
pagan - 异教徒的；非基督教徒
raucous - 刺耳的，沙哑的
grab - 抓住
whip - 鞭子；鞭打
spank - 打屁股
maiden - 少女；未婚的
legalize - 在法律上承认，使合法化
peg - 挂钩，使关联
legend - 传说
bolster - 支撑
forbid-forbade-forbidden
flout - 无视
ban - 禁令；禁止
defiance - 公然反抗
tame - 平淡
retail - 零售
discretionary - 任意的
indication - 征兆
perspective - 想法
uptick - 上升
premature - 过早的，早产的
compensate - 补偿
correlate - 相互关联
expenditure - 消费，支出
splurge - 挥霍
routine - 日常工作
confine - 限制
spouse - 配偶者
invest - 花费，投资
mentality - 心理，思想
normative - 规范的，确立标准的
rational - 理性的，合理的
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