Quoting is easier than blogging, take 14

10 years ago, Eve Ensler declared Valentine's Day "V-Day," and began a movement to use the day to draw attention to violence against women and girls.

V-Day is a global movement to stop violence against women and girls. V-Day is a catalyst that promotes creative events to increase awareness, raise money and revitalize the spirit of existing anti-violence organizations.
-www.vday.org


Some other interesting St. V Day notes:

A DAY TO FORGET
(The intro to an article by NANCY GIBBS, TIME MAGAZINE, Thursday, Feb. 07, 2008)


I'm sentimental about many things: the lumpy feel of a baby's unused feet, the metallic smell of the air before the first snow, the last scene in It's a Wonderful life. But Valentine's Day leaves me cold. It's a holiday that has no idea of what it's really celebrating. Or at least no idea of whom it celebrates: St. Valentine could be any of half a dozen Christian martyrs whom the early church recruited to clean up and bless pagan fertility festivals. Of the top candidates, the best known is a priest named Valentinus, who was beheaded by Emperor Claudius the Cruel on Feb. 14, A.D. 269. Upon slim evidence, whole layers of legend are stacked: that Valentinus performed secret weddings after Claudius banned marriage to prevent soldiers from deserting his armies; that he refused to deny Christ and so was thrown in prison, where he healed the jailer's blind daughter; that he fell in love with her and left a note in the cracks of his cell the night before his execution, "From your Valentine.''


WIKIPEDIA SAYS:

Professor Oruch has made the case that the traditions associated with "Valentine's Day", documented in Geoffrey Chaucer's Parliament of Foules, and set in the fictional context of an old tradition, had no such tradition before Chaucer.
...
English eighteenth-century antiquarians Alban Butler and Francis Douce, noting the obscurity of Saint Valentine's identity, suggested Valentine's Day was created as an attempt to supersede the pagan holiday of Lupercalia.

...

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, but Howard took her inspiration from an English valentine she had received, so clearly the practice of sending Valentine's cards had existed in England before it became popular in North America. The English practice of sending Valentine's cards appears in Elizabeth Gaskell's Mr. Harrison's Confessions (published 1851). Since 2001, the Greeting Card Association has been giving an annual "Esther Howland Award for a Greeting Card Visionary" award.