“My Country” Love Stats

Today is Valentine's Day - a day filled with hearts, candy, and love.  But, there's more behind this romantic holiday than flowers and flirting.  Impress your date tonight with these little-known facts and stats.

1.  More than 36 million heart-shaped boxes of chocolate will be sold for Valentine's Day, and in 2009, 8 billion candy hearts were made.  Yummy.

2.  Valentine's Day is the second biggest greeting-card holiday with 190 million Valentine's Day cards sold annually.  The number 1 spot goes to, of course, Christmas.

3.  There are two popular theories for the origin of Valentine's Day.  The first is that the day derives from Lupercalia - a Roman festival where naked men spanked young women in hopes of increasing their fertility.  The second, and more well-known, is that Valentine's Day commemorates the execution of St. Valentine whose only crime was to perform secret marriages in direct violation of Roman emperor Claudius II's ban on the institution.  Personally, I'm in favor of the first.  There's nothing like a good fertility festival to celebrate love.

4.  In the Middle Ages, young men and women pinned the names of their Valentines on their sleeves for a week so the entire community knew their true feelings.  Of course, they determined who their Valentines were by drawing names at random, so I'm not sure how "true" those feelings really were.  So that's where we get the phrase "wearing your heart on your sleeve".

5.  The "X" became synonymous with the "kiss" in the Middle Ages when people who couldn't write their names signed documents with a simple "X".  They would then kiss the "X" to show their sincerity.

So, take your favorite Valentine out for dinner, get the conversation started with these tidbits, and tell us how it goes!