"All you need Be someone's love... dat..... dadat... da da" — Beatles. [?]lentine. Monday 14 February

Ruapehu Bulletin, Volume 11, Issue 522, 8 February 1994, Page 6

"All you need Be someone's

love... dat..... dadat... da da" — Beatles. [?]lentine. Monday 14 February

Valentine's Day, Monday 14 February, is celebrated by people around the world in many different ways. They send cards to each other asking, "be my valentine," American children make their own cards and hold classroon valentine parties, older students

attend dances, and many people send gifts of flowers, chocolates or candy. Valentine's Day had a sad beginning. The first valentine was sent in 270AD by St Valentine himself, on the eve of his execution. It was sent to his jailer's daughter, who had

brought him food and delivered messages for him. Lovers started sending unsigned valentines about the year 1400, and in 18th Century France a gi'rl's father considered an elaborate valentine a proposal of marriage. People in Italy have feasts and many unmarried women stand at their windows from sunrise watching for the right man to pass. In Denmark people send white flowers called snowdrops to each other. In Britain some children sing St Valentine' s Day songs and some people bake valentine buns with caraway seeds, plums or raisins. Many Valentine' s Day customs involved way s that single women could learn who their future husbands would be. English women of the 1700's wrote men's names on scraps of paper, rc led each in a little piece of clay, and dropped them all into water. The first roll that rose to the surface supposedly had the name of a woman's true love. Also in the 1700's, unmarried women pinned five bayleaves to their pillows on the eve of Valentine' s Day. They pinned one leaf to the centre of the pillow and one to each corner. If the charm worked, they saw their future husbands in their dreams. In Derbyshire, a county in central England, young women circled the church three or 12 times at midnight and repeated such verses as: I sow hempseed. Hempseed I sow. He that loves me best, come after me now. Their true love then supposedly appeared.