by Rhonda Hart

Created on: December 15, 2009

Valentine's Day means love and romance in many cultures, but the customs for celebrating it differ. Here are some facts about the “unusual” ways that people around the world have, or do, celebrate Valentine's Day:

Early Europeans believed that February 14 was the day that birds chose their mates. In keeping with the belief, groups of French boys and girls would gather to draw names. Boys drew the names of girls at random. Each boy would then pin his new sweetheart's name to his sleeve. Hence, Valentine's Day is literally a day to “wear your heart on your sleeve.”

The drawing of names to pick a mate has origins dating all the way back to the predawn of ancient Rome. A celebration called Lupercalia, meaning “Wolf Festival,” was held on February 15 to honor the god Lupercus, safe-keeper of shepherds and flocks. The festival was a heathenish rite to drive away evil spirits, in which men wore skins from sacrificed animals and women were whipped to make them more fertile. During the barbarism, men drew the names of women from a box in order for them to pair up. The couple then stayed together at least until the next year's celebration. The church soon put an end to such pagan activities and changed the holiday to Saint Valentine's Day, held on February 14.

A much reformed variation on name drawing is the way English women in the 1700's practiced finding a husband. They wrote the names of men they admired on slips of paper, rolled them up inside a clay ball, and dropped them into a container of water. They found their future husbands by retrieving the first ball to rise to the surface.

Some Valentine's rituals were superstitious in nature. In the 1700's, unmarried women pinned five bay leaves to their pillows, and then before bedtime they consumed hard boiled eggs whose yolk cavity had been filled with salt. This supposedly conjured dreams of a future true love.

In Britain and Italy, young, unmarried women would get up early on Valentine's Day morning to stand by their windows. If luck would have it, the first man to pass by such a woman's window would become her husband within a year.

British women would also circle a church 12 times, while chanting a rhyme to make their future beloved appear in a dream.

In some places, it was believed that the first bird seen on Valentine's Day symbolized the type of man a women would marry. Seeing a robin meant she would marry a sailor. A goldfinch meant she would marry into wealth, a bluebird

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