The first Valentine's day was in the year 496, which considering this is the year 2011, that's a lot of those horrible chalky message hearts which make better sidewalk chalk than candy, but not by much. I wasn't around back then, but I'm sure Dadda was, or maybe Grampa. Anyway, so there were a bunch of guys guys named "Valentine" that got the holiday named after them cuz they died. If they name a holiday after Dadda's eventual demise, they'll have to call it double-bacon cheeseburger day. I'm kidding, Dadda and I have at least a hundred years to go. We have to see the episode of Handy Manny where they open that time-capsule.
Well, nobody is sure which Valentine got the day named after him, so they just chose all of them around the 14th century. Why do they call this the 21st century? Did anybody ever wonder which hundred years was the zeroeth century? So one of these guys was in a time-out because he liked Jesus and then he sent a letter to a girl and signed it, "From Your Valentine" before he was dispatched. Legend has it she was the daughter of the guy that put him in time-out and he cured her of blindness which is why he's called Saint Valentine.
That's it, not very romantic huh? There was a holiday named Lupercalia from February 13th-15th that celebrated making baybees, (Now we're talking a holiday for baybees!) but it was abolished by church. Boo! Later a poet named Chaucer wrote a line in a poem about Volantynys day, the day when birds choose which bird to make baybee birds with. Now, everybody knows birds fly South for the winter and for the tequila, and they don't do anything during February because it's too dang cold, so that doesn't make sense.
Eventually poets throughout history invented the greeting card, and indirectly the Valentine Pun.
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There's a picture of a bee on it. |
Today I am