Instead, St. Valentine’s Day suddenly surged in popularity in the 1840s. As Graham’s American Monthly announced in 1849, Feb. 14 “is becoming, nay, it has become, a national holyday.”
The day’s revival hardly stemmed from an unexpected burst of romantic love or a studied retrieval of folk customs. Rather, what made it all the rage was a new and fashionable commodity: commercially produced valentines, inventive seasonal prints that relied on lace-paper delicacy and ornamental frills for their appeal.
Holiday promotions and advertising, even for Christmas, were relatively undeveloped in the 1830s. The prevailing wisdom among employers was that holidays were impediments to enterprise: They were costly interruptions of labor and trade; they encouraged license, drunkenness and revelry; they diminished the virtues of industry and frugality. Time is money, after all.
St. Valentine’s Day provided an occasion to take another look at the economics of civic observance. Perhaps holidays offered a way to attract shoppers and create a ritual cycle for consumption; perhaps those shopkeepers of steady habits had made the wrong calculation.
by Leigh E. Schmidt, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division
