When you want to give a winning gift and make a lasting impression to the people you cherish most, you may think first about delicious, high-quality Valentine’s Day chocolate. But why, on February 14, our designated day of love, do we give specialty chocolates (because run-of-the-mill just won’t do) or gourmet chocolate gift baskets to the ones we adore?
Here are a few tasty morsels of Valentine’s Day history about why we give chocolate. Consider them a little gift for you from Chocolate Pizza Company.
A Brief History of Valentine’s Day
If you want to understand why chocolate and Valentine’s go together so well, take a brief look at the history of Valentine’s Day itself. The origins of this day of love most likely stem from an ancient pagan holiday celebrated in Rome – before Rome was ever an empire – named Lupercalia.
Hardly a celebration of romantic love, Lupercalia was more about fertility, and it involved animal sacrifices and ritualistic or symbolic beatings. Outside of the time of year it occurred, Lupercalia does not seem to have anything in common with the Valentine’s Day we currently observe.
This festive February day was eventually co-opted by the Roman Church (centuries later) and transformed into a Catholic day of feasting in honor of a martyred saint named Valentine. And while there were many saints named Valentine over the years, the legend that endured is one of a Valentine who was a Roman priest.
This priest married soldiers to their spouses in secret because, at the time, the law forbade military men from marrying. The logic behind the decree was that soldiers with wives would be distracted by domestic life, making them less effective fighters. If a soldier wanted to find Saint Valentine to perform a clandestine wedding, he could identify the saintly priest by the ring he wore on his hand. The ring allegedly had a Cupid engraved on it, a Roman mythological symbol of love.
The Flavor of Love
Let’s hop over to Central and South America to understand the relationship between love and chocolate better. Way before Saint Valentine performed secrete weddings, the Mayans used a hot beverage brewed from cacao as part of their marriage rituals.
The Aztecs saw chocolate as an aphrodisiac, and Montezuma II, the Aztec emperor, binged on large quantities of cocoa beans to fortify himself before romantic interludes. There may not be scientific evidence to support chocolate as an ancient love enhancement, but it does contain chemicals that can give you that feeling of passion.
Why We Give Chocolate on Valentine’s Day
Over the centuries, St. Valentine’s Day evolved into a day to demonstrate our warmer emotions, especially in English-speaking countries – but chocolate still hadn’t entered the picture yet. Admirers often exchanged flowers, especially roses, and cards to express courtly affection and love. Sugar-based goodies were still too expensive and rare to hand out every year to the people you adored.
It wasn’t until the mid-1800s that Valentine’s Day chocolate entered the picture. The British chocolate industry, focusing on making better-tasting drinking chocolate, enhanced the cocoa butter extraction process. These extraction improvements quickly led to an overabundance of cocoa butter.
That surplus butter became a crucial ingredient in chocolates meant for eating, not drinking. Soon after, these bite-sized chocolates were marketed to the public in attractive (often heart-shaped) reusable decorative boxes for Valentine’s Day. And voilà , the tradition of giving chocolate on Valentine’s Day was born.
A Few Valentine’s Day Chocolate Stats
How much chocolate is sold on Valentine’s Day? Well, an unscientific estimate would be a heck of a lot. If you want to get down to the nitty-gritty, when looking at the United States, men and women spend almost 20 billion dollars on gifts and romantic gestures (trips, gifts, dinners out, etc.) during Cupid’s holiday every year.
Focusing on Valentine’s Day chocolate, around $1.8 billion goes toward candy, with at least 58 million pounds of chocolate bought during the week leading up to February the 14th. Hundreds of millions of dollars go into Valentine’s Day chocolates annually.
Innovative Chocolate Gifts to Wow Your Love
It’s a massive industry, but if you want to stand out from the humdrum gift-giving crowd, you’ll have to get creative with your chocolate-themed choices. Sophisticated yet playful gifts like personalized Chocolate Pizzas or Peanut Butter Wings, made with Swiss-style chocolate and homemade English toffee, will add heaps of artful distinctiveness to your chocolate-gifting game.
Be sure to shop Chocolate Pizza often to find the latest confections to make Valentine’s Day or any day special for the ones you love. We have creative chocolate gift ideas to make any celebration a little sweeter.
