Love is in the air!

Valentine’s Day, also called St Valentine’s Day, is marked across the world by lovers who express their affection for each other with greetings and gifts.

It was about the 14th century when Valentine’s Day came to be celebrated as a day of romance, with formal messages, or valentines, appearing in the 1500s, and by the late 1700s commercially printed cards were being used.

Cupid is often portrayed on Valentine’s Day cards as a cherub launching arrows of love at unsuspecting lovers.

The oldest known valentine still in existence today was a poem written in 1415 by Charles, Duke of Orleans, to his wife while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London following his capture at the Battle of Agincourt. (The greeting is now part of the manuscript collection of the British Library in London, England.)

Several years later, it is believed that King Henry V hired a writer named John Lydgate to compose a valentine note to Catherine of Valois.

In Great Britain, Valentine’s Day began to be popularly celebrated around the 17th century and by the middle of the 18th, it was common for friends and lovers of all social classes to exchange small tokens of affection or handwritten notes.

By 1900 printed cards began to replace written letters due to improvements in printing technology and ready-made cards were an easy way for people to express their emotions at a time when direct expression of one’s feelings was discouraged.

Cheaper postage rates also contributed to an increase in the popularity of sending Valentine’s Day greetings.

In the 1840s, Esther A Howland began selling the first mass-produced valentines in the United States.

Howland, known as the ‘Mother of the Valentine’, made elaborate creations with real lace, ribbons and colourful pictures known as “scrap”.

Today, according to the Greeting Card Association, an estimated 145 million Valentine’s Day cards are sent each year, making Valentine’s Day the second largest card-sending holiday of the year in the US, after Christmas.