People have been sending out valentines for hundreds of years, but how did the tradition begin? And why do we hand the cards out on February 14? I dug into the history of this holiday tradition to find out.
According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, Valentine’s Day cards were one of the first commercial greeting cards ever made, but the holiday wasn’t made official until well after St. Valentine penned his love letter. In 498, Pope Gelasius declared February 14 as St. Valentine’s Day in honor of St. Valentine himself, the patron saint of love. A few hundred years later, the tradition really took off. In the early 1800s, paper valentines were being produced in factories in England. The cards were made with lace, ribbons, and paint, and often had phrases or poems handwritten on the front. The Museum of London estimates that by 1825, 200,000 Valentine’s Day cards were given each year in London alone. After the invention of the penny postal service in 1840 (what would become modern-day postage stamps), the number had doubled. By 1871, 1.2 million cards had been processed by the General Post Office of London. Around 1850, the tradition had crossed the Atlantic. A female artist named Esther Howland from Worcester, Massachusetts, was the first to create and produce valentines in America. By the early 1900s, a man named J.C. Hall was selling Valentine’s Day postcards from Kansas City, Missouri. In 1910, Hall founded Hallmark Cards, Inc. and added greeting cards to his inventory in 1912. The company’s first printed Valentine’s Day cards appeared on store shelves in 1916, and the Valentine’s Day tradition we know and love today was born.
