SIOUX CITY | Valentine's Day is the second most commercialized holiday behind Christmas.
The National Retail Federation says total Valentine's Day spending for 2017 is expected to hit a record $19.7 billion as Americans celebrate with candy, flowers, jewelry and, of course, greeting cards.
Bruce Forbes, a Morningside College professor and chair of religious studies, said he is often asked after a lecture whether Valentine's Day was just a holiday dreamed up by Hallmark Cards to make money.
"They did take advantage of it and they advanced it, but they didn't start it," said Forbes, whose book "America's Favorite Holidays: Candid Histories" features a chapter on Valentine's Day.Â
The suspected origins of Valentine's Day date back much farther than 1913, when Hallmark Cards of Kansas City, Missouri, began producing its first printed valentines.
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Forbes said some scholars link Valentine's Day with St. Valentine, a Roman priest who was imprisoned and executed on Feb. 14. St. Valentine defied an order from Emperor Claudius II, which banned all marriages and engagements in Rome to strengthen the army. St. Valentine continued to perform weddings and was beheaded for his misdeeds.
When the persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire ended, Forbes said some believe a pope replaced a Roman fertility festival with Valentine's Day sometime in the 400s, but he said this conventional history of Valentine's Day doesn't hold up.
"The problem is, for the next 1,000 years there's no indication of romantic couples doing something special on Feb. 14," he said. "If that's when it's supposed to have begun you would think something would have begun and it didn't."
Jump ahead to the late Middle Ages when Geoffrey Chaucer, the father of English Literature, was living in London. Forbes said Chaucer was a bit of a "love poet," who writes of love birds choosing their mates on Feb. 14.
"It's poetry in the Middle Ages that gets it started," he said.
Forbes said the first Valentine's Day letters and poems were handwritten and sent by the aristocracy in the 1400s. By the 1820s, he said sending printed Valentine's Day cards to each other became a "big fad" in Europe. About 20 years later, the trend reached the United States. In New York in 1843, Forbes said there were 15,000 Valentines Day cards exchanged. A year later, 21,000. A year after that: 30,000.
"Similar things were happening like that in Boston and Philadelphia," Forbes said. "Emily Dickinson, the famous poet, in 1849 says there's so many valentines going around that they're like snowflakes."
In fact, Americans were mailing Valentines Day cards before they were sending Christmas cards. Two years after Hallmark printed its first Valentine's Day cards, Forbes the company added Christmas cards.
"A lot of the early cards were imported from Europe, but with World War I that stopped. That left the opportunity for Hallmark to take over the market, which they did," he said.
Today, engagement rings account for the majority of total Valentine's Day spending. In 2013, Forbes said more than 40 percent of engagements for the year occurred on Valentine's Day.
Forbes said Valentine's Day puts pressure on consumers to spend money, but he said it also gives them a day to show other people how much they care for them.
"We are influenced by the merchants, but we also decide what's going to take off and what doesn't," he said. "What is (Valentine's Day) so popular in our culture? I think it's reflecting us, not just shaping us."
