St. Valentine's Day

I was going to give you a rundown on the history of Valentine's Day, but that would be too depressing, what with me being single and all. Then I was going to send all of my female readers an e-v day card but that would have been cheesy and would have lent to the commercialization of another holiday. Then I decided I would give a shout down to V-day, but some of my blogger friends already have beaten me to the punch, such as steph, sarah, amz and bluez to name a few.

Okay, I give up. Here's some chocolate for you...



Instead I'll just share this forgotten word & blurb with you, courtesy of my calendar:

LADDESS: Lad made, once upon a time, a feminine laddess, which subsequently shrunk into simply lass.
- M. Schele de Vere's Studies in English, 1867.

VALENTINE'S DAY
Alice Morse Earle, writing in Colonial Days of Old New York (1896), described a curious Valentine's Day observance among early Dutch settlers called Vrouwne dagh, or Women's Day: "Every young girl sallied forth in the morning armed with a heavy cord with knotted end. She gave every young man whom she met several smart lashes with the knotted cord. Perhaps these were 'love-taps,' and were given with no intent of stinging. Judge Egbert Benson wrote in 1816 that in New York this custom dwindled to a similar Valentine observance by children when the girls chased the boys with many blows. In one school the boys asked for a Mannen dagh (Men's Day) in which to repay the girls stinging lashes." The English author Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682) speculated that this custom commemorated the martyrdom of St. Valentine, whom the Romans are believed to have persecuted around the year 270.