All the Whyser

Where Did the Calendar Come From?

Where did our calendar system come from? The answer involves the sun, moon, and stars—with a dose of Roman Catholicism, colonialism, and globalization.

We live our lives by the calendar. We divide and plan and track our time based on a calendar system that we accept as true and real, but have you ever thought that it has not always been this way, that it doesn’t have to be this way, and in some parts of the world, they use a different calendar system?

The current calendar system used in 168 countries around the world is called the Gregorian calendar. Though we take this common system of reckoning time as a given, it is largely a function of Roman Catholicism, colonialism, and globalization that it has proliferated throughout the world.

Pre-Julian Calendars

Societies throughout the world have generally marked time by following patterns of the sun and moon. Calendar systems developed around the solar cycle (the time it takes the earth to revolve around the sun), the lunar cycle (the 29.5 days from new moon through the eight phases of the moon), and a given society’s festivals and harvest celebrations.

The Gregorian calendar, like many of its precursors, divides time into days based on the earth’s rotation, weeks roughly based on the length of the phases of the moon, months roughly based on the length of the entire moon cycle, and years based on the earth’s revolution around the sun. However, the movements of celestial bodies don’t always conveniently line up with human constructs of time, so we have to compensate by adding extra days here and there to realign with the skies and seasons.

Calendars developed by the Babylonians and Egyptians were the precursors to the modern Gregorian calendar, but they were far from the only ones. For example, the Jewish calendar, the Mayan and Aztec calendars, and the Chinese calendar developed during the Shang dynasty used measurements of the sun, moon, and stars to develop a complex system of chronology to mark time and track agricultural, economic, and ritual events.

The Julian Calendar

In the year 45 BCE, Julius Caesar implemented what was known as the Julian calendar, consisting of a 365-day solar year divided into 12 months and a leap year of 366 days every four years. Julius also moved the start of the new year from March 1 to January 1.

The fall of the Roman Empire led to a gradual shift of the new year to coincide with Christmas Day in many countries. The legal new year was January 1, but by the ninth century, southern European countries had moved their new year to March 25 to coincide with Annunciation Day, and England followed suit several centuries later.

Records often indicate events happening in “the first month” (March), “the second month” (April), and so on, where September (from sept- meaning “seven”) is the seventh month, October (from oct- meaning “eight”) is the eighth month, November (from nov- meaning “nine”) is the ninth month, and December (from deci meaning “ten”) is the tenth month—as it should be.

Now, because the new year has been moved to January, the names of these months do not correspond to their numerical order in the calendar year (e.g., September is the ninth month rather than the seventh month).

The Gregorian Calendar

In the Middle Ages, it became apparent that the Julian calendar had a big flaw: there were too many leap years.

We typically think of a year as 365 days, corresponding to the amount of time it takes the earth to travel around the sun. However, the solar year is actually 365.2422 days, to be exact. The Julian calendar added a leap year every four years, but this formula made the calendar year slightly longer than the solar year over time.

After over 1,500 years, the spring and fall equinoxes fell 10 days early according the calendar in relation to the actual equinoxes determined by the position of the sun. By definition, an equinox is when the sun is directly over the equator, making the day and night of equal length. At the spring equinox, the sun is moving northward, and at the fall equinox, the sun is moving southward. This was a concern to Roman Catholics, who determined the date of Easter with the assumption that the spring equinox was on March 21 each year. The shift in the calendar date relative to the spring equinox meant that Easter, with its reference to Passover and imagery of new life and rebirth, was celebrated earlier and earlier before spring truly started.

So, in 1582, Pope Gregory XVIII proposed the Gregorian calendar. It resolved the leap year issue by implementing a leap year every four years except when the year is divisible by 100—and when the year was divisible by 400, the leap year is added anyway (so 1996 and 2000 were leap years, but not 1900). In addition, the first year the calendar was implemented, 10 days were dropped from the month of October to fix the equinox issue and ensure Easter was celebrated in the spring. Finally, January 1 was officially the date of the new year.

Most Roman Catholic countries quickly adopted the new calendar to correct the dates of observance of religious holidays. Protestants were generally suspicious of the Gregorian calendar and viewed it as an attempt by the pope to slow the spread of Protestantism. Most Orthodox and Protestant countries initially rejected the Gregorian calendar and continued to use the older system. This included England and its colonies in the Americas.

The Change of 1752

After the Gregorian calendar had been in use for about 200 years, there were a total of 11 days’ difference between the two calendar systems, and it was making global communication difficult. Eventually, an Act of Parliament in 1750 put an end to the confusion. The 1752 switch, as it was called, was accomplished in a series of steps that enraged and confused everyone for a bit, but it worked out. Benjamin Franklin even welcomed the new system, writing, “It is pleasant for an old man to be able to go to bed on September 2, and not have to get up until September 14.” (Maybe we’ll make the jump to the metric system at some point too—who knows?)

Due to the discrepancies in the Julian and Gregorian calendar systems, both in use from 1582 to 1752, a double-dating system developed that included both the “old style” and “new style” date. You might see dates like February 8, 1686/7 in civil records from England or the American colonies. Historians today typically preserve the old style date in transcriptions. But directly after the change, some people converted significant dates to the new style. For example, George Washington was born on February 11, 1731 according to the Julian calendar, but he later used February 22, 1732 as his birth date in line with the Gregorian calendar.

The Spread of the Gregorian Calendar

Over the course of centuries, Catholic, then Protestant, then Orthodox European countries adopted the Gregorian calendar system. By the early twentieth century, Western nations were largely using the same calendar, and so were the areas formerly or currently colonized by them. Many other nations in the world eventually followed to allow ease of communication and business as the world became more interconnected.

Other Calendar Systems

Some countries that have adopted the Gregorian calendar for civil and administrative purposes have also retained another calendar system alongside it for religious or cultural purposes. For example, Israel uses the Hebrew calendar for religious purposes and the Gregorian calendar for civil purposes. China officially uses the Gregorian calendar, but the traditional Chinese lunar-solar calendar is used to determine cultural holidays, including Chinese New Year (Spring Festival) and Shangyuan (Lantern Festival). It is also used to determine fortunate days for weddings and other events.

Map of civil calendars used around the world.
Image by Weaveravel, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Other countries do not use the Gregorian system at all and use another calendar system for all purposes. Iran and Afghanistan, for example, use the Solar Hijri calendar, an ancient Iranian calendar that begins on the spring equinox. Because it uses astronomical calculations to determine the equinox, it is considered the most accurate solar calendar currently in use. This day is called Nowruz (“New Day”) and is one of the biggest celebrations in countries that use the Solar Hijri calendar and countries with a strong Iranian/Persian influence. The names of the 12 months come from the Zoroastrian calendar and correspond to the 12 zodiac signs. The first six months have 31 days, the next five months have 30 days, and the last month has 29 days unless it’s a leap year, in which case it has 30. Its epoch (the year from which the calendar year is determined) is 500 BCE.

Ethiopia has a rather interesting calendar system as well. The Ethiopian or Ge’ez calendar is derived from the Coptic Egyptian calendar and was first used by the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church. It is used today as the liturgical calendar in various Ethiopian churches as well as the administrative calendar for the country. The Ethiopian calendar usually begins on the the equivalent of September 11 on the Gregorian calendar. Its epoch is held to be the Annunciation of Christ, but it uses an alternative calculation—placing it about seven years behind the Gregorian calendar system. This current era is called the Incarnation Era. The Ethiopian calendar has 13 months—the first 12 are 30 days each, and the 13th month gets five or six days to align with the solar year. Due to all the differences between the calendar systems, on January 16, 2023, on the Gregorian calendar, it is August 8, 2015 on the Ethiopian calendar.

As one last example, the Thai solar calendar is used as the administrative calendar of Thailand alongside the Thai lunar calendar for cultural and religious events. The Thai solar calendar is essentially a renumbering of the Gregorian calendar and was adopted in 1888 CE. The epoch is the passing away of the Buddha, called the Parinibbāna, corresponding to the Gregorian year 543 BCE. The current era is known as the Buddhist Era, which is shared by a set of Buddhist lunar-solar calendars used in southeast Asia. These calendars ultimately derive from the Hindu calendar, and the names of the months of the Thai solar calendar are derived from the Hindu names for the signs of the zodiac. The traditional new year is celebrated in April, when the sun crosses the constellation of Aries—the first astrological sign in the zodiac. However, in 1941, the prime minister declared that January 1 would be the start of the new year. Another interesting part of the Thai calendar system is that each day of the week corresponds to a color, a celestial body, and a deity. For example, Monday is associated with the color yellow, the moon, and Chandra, the Hindu god of the moon. Wednesday is divided into day and night, each with its own correlations.

Reckoning with Time

So, the fact is that our reckoning of time is not unchanging nor universal. Though it makes perfectly good sense to those who use it, the Gregorian calendar has been shaped by geography and climate, by religious holidays and agricultural seasons, by the ordering of time in linear fashion rather than in a cyclical manner, as some societies do. It has spread across the globe for reasons both good and bad, but the fact is that this system in turn shapes the way we think about time and the way we order our lives.

But—we’re still slightly short of the full solar year. Someday, it just might catch up to us and we’ll all have to get on board with another calendar realignment.

Sources

Jennie Cohen, “6 Things You May Not Know About the Gregorian Calendar.” History.com, August 22, 2018. https://www.history.com/news/6-things-you-may-not-know-about-the-gregorian-calendar.

Encyclopaedia Brittanica, “Calendar.”

Connecticut State Library, “The 1752 Calendar Change,” https://libguides.ctstatelibrary.org/hg/colonialresearch/calendar.

Amber Pariona, “What Is the Gregorian Calendar?” World Atlas, April 25, 2017. https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/what-is-the-gregorian-calendar.html.

Sarah W. Wanza, “Countries That Use Their Own Calendar.” World Atlas, May 29, 2018. https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/countries-that-use-their-own-calendar.html

Christmas Stockings

Why do we hang oversized socks on our mantels on Christmas Eve? The answer involves marriage dowries, competition for with Christmas trees, and jolly old Saint Nicholas.

“The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there.”
– A Visit from Saint Nicholas

Many of us have fond memories of waking up on Christmas morning and unwrapping long-anticipated gifts. Just when we thought the excitement was over, we turned to our stocking, pulling one thing after another in delight—candy and small trinkets and electronic gadgets and probably some socks.

But in 1823, when Clement Clark Moore wrote his famous poem now beginning with the line “Twas the night before Christmas,” stockings were the main event, rather than being an accessory to larger or more expensive presents. At this time, stockings were typically filled with fruit, nuts, candies, wooden toys or dolls, and pennies.

The Origin of Christmas Stockings

Saint Nicholas, 18th century Russian icon.
Image via Wikimedia Commons.

Stockings have been a part of Christmas for at least two hundred years, but nobody knows exactly when or how the tradition started. But, they can be traced back to Saint Nicholas himself. Stockings are part of a gift-giving tradition in honor of Saint Nicholas, a generous nobleman born in 280 CE in Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey). He was known for his love and kindness toward children. Saint Nicholas dedicated his life to Jesus Christ through giving to the poor and alleviating suffering. He became known as the “gift-giver of Myra” for dropping off anonymous gifts late at night when no one was awake. After his death, he was made the patron saint of children.

A story of Saint Nicholas’s charitable deeds called the “Three Impoverished Maidens” may explain the phenomenon of stockings. The story is of unknown origin, date, and historicity, but it was recorded in Michael the Archimandrite’s Life of Saint Nicholas.

The tale goes that a recently widowed man with three daughters was struggling to make ends meet for his family. Though once wealthy, he had lost all his money due to terrible misfortune. He worried that his meager finances would scare away potential suitors for his daughters and render the family unable to provide the customary dowry. (One version of the story says that the father was about to resort to selling his daughters into prostitution to save them all from starvation.)

Well, Saint Nicholas was traveling through town when he heard talk of the family’s financial woes. Knowing that the man would likely reject any direct charitable offerings, Saint Nicholas threw a bag of gold coins through an open window. The gold coins landed in a stocking hanging up to dry by the fire. (Another version says that he slid down the chimney of the family’s house and spied some recently washed stockings drying by the fireplace. He filled one sock for each of the three daughters with gold coins and then disappeared back up the chimney.)

Painting of Saint Nicholas tossing gold in the window.
Gentile da Fabriano, ca. 1425, Pinacoteca Vaticana collection. Image from the Yorck Project (2002).

The daughters awoke and, with surprise, discovered the gold coins. No longer did the father fear that his daughters would end up as lonely old maids! He immediately arranged a marriage for his first daughter, with the coins as dowry. Saint Nicholas later threw a second bag of gold coins for the second daughter, and only on the third bag did the father discover his identity.

(Surely this is really a heartbreaking exposé of the harmful societal pressures placed upon young girls and the perceived lack of opportunities, fulfillment, and economic stability outside of a marital union deemed respectable in terms of its potential for social climbing.)

(Surely it was not understood that way.)

But the legend spread, and soon Saint Nicholas was known for filling stockings left by the fireplace with small gifts on Saint Nicholas Day. By the early 1800s, the stocking tradition was observed in the United States, and the charitable gifting of Saint Nicholas was incorporated into the Christmas holiday. “A Visit from Saint Nicholas” played a major role in shaping the popular image of Christmas celebrations related to Santa Claus. As the narrator observes,

“He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,
And filled all the stockings; then turned with a jerk,
And laying his finger aside of his nose,
And giving a nod, up the chimney he rose.”

When the Christmas tree was rising in popularity in the mid-1800s, stockings fell out of favor for a time because there was more room for bigger gifts underneath the tree. In 1883, the New York Times celebrated the return of the stocking to mantels across the country in contrast to Christmas trees, which it called “dull and lifeless” corpses. Thankfully, there was room enough for both. Bigger presents were nestled under the Christmas tree, while the items placed in stockings were lesser in importance and considered secondary gifts.

Stocking Stuffers

During the Victorian Age, stockings were the container for most of the Christmas gifts for each family member. Toys, nuts, candy, fruit, and coins were common presents for children. Little boys might get a set of marbles or a toy pistol, and little girls might get some drawing supplies or a sewing kit. Mother might find an apron, a pincushion, and some hair pins. Father would be delighted to receive some cigars, a warm scarf, or his favorite sweets.

The Industrial Revolution revolutionized expectations regarding quality of life and the availability of material goods to all classes of society, overlapping with the rise in popularity of Christmas gifting. But during the two World Wars and the Great Depression, rationing and wartime shortages limited gifting, to say the least, and made day-to-day necessities difficult to obtain.

During the Christmas season of 1939, some political leaders discouraged extra spending on non-essential items and Christmas gifts. This directive was ignored by many citizens who bought war-themed items like mini nurse or naval uniforms for children, or the patriotic choice of war bonds and savings certificates. In England, people were encouraged to buy French goods in support of the French resistance to Germany.

As World War II progressed, people gave practical gifts like gardening supplies or soap if it could be found, or they repurposed and made gifts by hand rather than purchasing new items. Nothing could be wasted.

However, following World War II, the mass production enabled by factories that supported the war effort gave way to ever greater availability of material goods for consumers of all social classes. Gradually, Christmas became a bigger and bigger commercial holiday. In addition to gifts underneath the Christmas tree, little girls and boys might get coins, nuts, oranges, and candy like licorice or chocolate cigar in their stocking. Most Christmas gifts, including stocking stuffers, were now storebought rather than homemade. And, where once stockings were literal hosiery, they were now decorative, sock-shaped bags.

Today, children might receive their favorite candies or snacks, small toys, socks or underwear, toiletries, activity books or art supplies, and fruit—but, for some reason, no coins! (Maybe it’s because pennies buy much these days.)

Good Kids Get Oranges and Naughty Kids Get Coal, Right?

The coins may have disappeared, but let’s take a look at some of the stocking stuffers that have stayed the course of time.

Oranges. Many children receive an orange in the toe of their stocking. Another version of the Saint Nicholas story swaps the gold coins for golden balls. Oranges were placed in stockings as an approximate likeness of the golden balls, a reminder of the generosity of Saint Nick. Alternatively, in a time when the common people in many areas of Europe did not have access to fresh fruit as often, oranges were an absolute delight on Christmas day. They were a luxury for ordinary families who reserved them as a special treat.

Nuts. Whole walnuts and sometimes other nuts have long been placed in stockings as a nod to a European tradition of scattering nuts during holiday celebrations. In ancient European traditions, the fall harvest yielded nuts, and scattering the nuts during winter festivals brought good fortune and fertility for the new year. The nuts were also thought to ward off evil spirits. Christianity adopted the three-part structure of nuts (shell, skin, and kernel) as a symbol of the trinity or as the bones, skin, and soul of Christ.

Candy. Candy has changed a lot throughout the years, but what’s Christmas without candy? Simple sugar sticks, the precursor to the candy cane, have been around since the late 1800s. Yesterday’s stockings might have a sugar mouse, lemon drops, or licorice, too. Chocolate did not become a popular Christmas treat until the twentieth century, but today you might find Hershey’s candy cane kisses, Reese’s peanut butter trees, or Lindor truffles in your stocking, along with the timeless candy canes.

A lump of coal? No one knows exactly where the threat of a lump of coal came from. The real Saint Nick didn’t seem like a particularly judgmental person, but later folklore about Santa Claus suggested otherwise. Since Santa was already in the fireplace, a lump of coal may have seemed like a good option for children whose conduct was unbecoming for other gifts. Additionally, in the beloved story A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge refuses to give Bob Cratchitt, his employee, even a single lump of coal to start a fire in his freezing cold office. So, there’s the twist: refusing a lump of coal where it is needed is contrary to the spirit of Christmas!

The contents and looks of Christmas stockings may have changed, but Saint Nicholas’s legacy of giving lives on. As we take one more dive to get every last piece of candy out of the bottom of the stocking this year, maybe we can take a pause to consider how we can be more generous to those in need.

Sources

Martin, Rachael. “Why Do Naughty Children Get Coal in Their Stockings and Good Ones Get Oranges?” Metro, December 23, 2019. https://metro.co.uk/2019/12/23/why-do-naughty-children-get-coal-in-their-stockings-and-good-ones-get-oranges-11925505/.

Moore, Clement Clark. “A Visit from Saint Nicholas.” Poetry Foundation. 1823. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43171/a-visit-from-st-nicholas.

Origjanska, Magda. “The Tradition of Hanging Christmas Stockings Was Introduced by St. Nicholas, the Patron of Children.” The Vintage News, December 29, 2017. https://www.thevintagenews.com/2017/12/29/christmas-stockings/?chrome=1.

PrezzyBox. “Stocking Fillers Through the Ages,” October 3, 2014. https://www.prezzybox.com/blog/stocking-fillers-through-the-ages.

Saunt, Raven. “Christmas Traditions: The Story of Santa Claus, and Why We Eat Mince Pies and Hang Up Stockings,” December 24, 2021. The Telegraph. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/christmas/0/best-christmas-traditions-uk-santa-claus-story-why-presents/.

Spivak, Emily. “The Legend of the Christmas Stocking.” Smithsonian Magazine, December 14, 2012. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/the-legend-of-the-christmas-stocking-160854441/.

Thaxton, Allyson. “Married to Money: Dowries in Regency England.” BYU Presents Pride and Prejudice, February 14, 2014. https://byuprideandprejudice.wordpress.com/2014/02/03/married-to-money-dowries-in-victorian-england/.

Wikipedia. “St. Nicholas.” Retrieved December 9, 2022, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Nicholas.

The History of Gingerbread

Where does gingerbread come from, and why is it called that? The answer involves the crusades, witchcraft, and taxation without representation.

What Is Gingerbread?

Gingerbread refers to an entire class of desserts often spiced with ginger, cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon, or pepper and sweetened with molasses or honey. The texture can range anywhere from a hard candy to a soft, moist cake to a thin, crunchy biscuit—but despite the name, gingerbread has never really been a bread.

Ginger and Bread

Ginger, the spice for which gingerbread is named, was first cultivated over 5,000 years ago in Southeast Asia as a medicinal agent and a spice for cooking. Around the first century CE, traders brought ginger to India and the Mediterranean via the Silk Road. Like most spices, it was expensive and highly sought after.

Early gingerbread recipes are found in many different cultures—there is probably no one single origin. But the first recorded recipe for gingerbread comes from Greece in about 2400 BCE. The Greeks and perhaps the Romans and Egyptians used honey-sweetened ginger cakes for ceremonial purposes (e.g., offering gingerbread to the dragons that guarded the temple of Pallas Athena) or served them at weddings. They were viewed as a status symbol due to the high price of ginger.

It’s not clear exactly where and when gingerbread made its way into Europe, a matter made more complicated by the changing meaning of the word. The word “gingerbread” comes from the Old French gingembras, based on the Latin term for ginger, zingebre. (This, in turn, developed from the older Sanskrit word meaning for “horn-shaped” or “antler-shaped” in reference to ginger’s multi-branched rhizome.) The word gingembras was adopted into English in the form gyngebreed, and though it did not have an etymological link to bread, it sounded enough like it that it eventually morphed into gingerbread. In medieval England, the term “gingerbread” referred more broadly to gingered food or any kind of preserved ginger, which was used as medicine and a spice to preserve meat. Over the centuries, “gingerbread” narrowed to specifically refer to ginger-flavored cakes and cookies.

Gingerbread in Europe

In 992, an Armenian monk called Gregory of Nicopolis fled to France and brought with him some ginger and a Byzantine recipe for honey-sweetened ginger cakes. These cakes left quite an impression, as recorded in a tenth-century manuscript: “His guests, on tasting the cake, believed they were experiencing all the delights of Heaven.” But when his ginger supply ran out, so did the heavenly ginger cakes. Gingerbread may have been introduced more widely to Europe in the eleventh century by Crusaders returning from the eastern Mediterranean, and trade routes opened a more steady supply of ginger.

One early type of gingerbread in Europe was a paste made of ground almonds, breadcrumbs, ginger, and rosewater and pressed into wooden molds depicting mythological scenes, stories from the Bible, saints, monarchs, or the news of the day. These edible storyboards were decorated with icing or gold paint. From the fifteenth century to the American colonial era, schoolchildren even made gingerbread “hornbooks” inscribed with the alphabet to help them learn how to read. (They got to eat each letter as they recited it—a delicious motivation to learn.)

Traditional gingerbread mold from Poland.
Image by Piotr Kuczyński, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The art of gingerbread making was practiced first in monasteries, which had exclusive access to ginger for a time. Monks and nuns in Sweden and other countries baked gingerbread to use as the Eucharist, to feed the poor, and to display religious scenes for instruction. They also used ginger to cure stomach ailments and to preserve food. Later, ginger made its way into royal kitchens and the homes of the fabulously wealthy—and it caught on. Gingerbread guilds were established to train and support master gingerbread bakers, who employed a high degree of skill and artistic ability in producing their gingerbread creations. Nuremburg and Ulm in Germany, Torun in Poland, and several other cities in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and France were world-renowned for their artisan gingerbread carefully crafted within gingerbread guilds.

A *Lebküchner* from a manuscript c. 1520, in the Stadtbibliothek Nürnberg.

As spices like ginger made their way into popular use, gingerbread quickly became a common treat at medieval fairs in France, England, and Germany, and there were even designated gingerbread fairs. Gingerbread was sometimes elaborately decorated with icing or even gold leaf and tied with a ribbon. People bought gingerbread to give as tokens to lovers, which was known as “fairing.” Eating gingerbread in a certain shape was thought to bring about a specific outcome. For example, a hare-shaped gingerbread was thought to bring fertility, and a pig-shaped gingerbread brought good fortune. Adoring fans bought gingerbread in the shape of flowers, birds, and hearts for their chosen knights as a good luck charm. Young women ate “gingerbread husbands” in hopes that a real husband would soon materialize.

As Shakespeare wrote in Love’s Labour’s Lost, “And I had but one penny in the world, thou should’st have it to buy gingerbread.”

German painting of a gingerbread fair.
By Konstantin Stoitzner, 19th century, oil on canvas, 58 x 79 cm. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

Gingerbread around the World

Gingerbread Men in England

As cheap gingerbread became widely available to the masses, the English court maintained a tradition of elaborate—and politically motivated—gingerbread baking.

Gingerbread men came around during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, who often hosted dinner parties featuring marzipan shaped like birds, fruit, and castles. It was a short jump to making gingerbread biscuits in the shape of important people invited to the dinner. Queen Elizabeth played her political cards by giving or withholding gingerbread likenesses to indicate favor for both her inner circle and visiting dignitaries and suitors.

Notwithstanding Queen Elizabeth’s fondness for sweets, gingerbread men fell out of favor during the rule of King James I in the 1600s because they were thought to possess dangerous magical powers. The magic of a good luck charm, it seemed, could also be used for evil. It was thought that witches could made gingerbread effigies in the shape of their enemies and eat them to cause their death.

Gingy the Gingerbread Man with legs bitten off. Text says: Not my gumdrop buttons!

King James, along with other Protestant European rulers, enacted harsh anti-witchcraft laws that reflected a deeply superstitious view of gingerbread figures and their potential association with the occult and with saint’s feasts celebrated in Catholicism.

Gingerbread Houses in Germany

Germany really took off with the gingerbread tradition and enjoyed all kinds of gingerbread treats—most notably Lebkuchen, which are soft honey-ginger cakes originally baked by monks, and Pfeffernüsse, which aresmall cookies spiced with pepper that are popular during Christmas. A harder form of Lebkuchen is often shaped into hearts with romantic sayings written in icing on the top, and sold at street markets and fairs.

Gingerbread houses most likely originated in Germany during the 16th century. They either inspired or were inspired by the witch’s house in the fairy tale “Hansel and Gretel,” which was “built of bread, and roofed with cakes, and the window was of transparent sugar.” In later versions, the house was described as gingerbread. Whichever direction the trend went, this story led to a surge in the popularity of gingerbread houses in Europe.

Waves of immigrants brought gingerbread houses to North America, and by the 1800s, gingerbread houses were popular among the German population in Pennsylvania as Christmas decorations.

Uncle Sam’s Gingerbread

Molasses—like just about everything else—was political in America. Molasses, a key ingredient in some gingerbread recipes, played a key role leading up to the revolution. The colonists used molasses not only for baking but also for making rum. When molasses imported from France became cheaper than molasses from the British-controlled Barbados and Jamaica, England sought a molasses monopoly in the colonies by passing the Molasses Act of 1733, imposing a tax on molasses from foreign nations. The colonists protested, ignored, and defied the Molasses Act and smuggled in foreign molasses anyway, leading England to retaliate in the form of more duties on sugar and molasses. This led to popular resentment of British rule and the subsequent revolution.

Meanwhile, early colonists shaped gingerbread into miniature kings before the revolution and bald eagles afterward. Another fun fact is that gingerbread cookies were once used in early political campaigns in Virginia as incentives for voters.

George Washington’s mother, Mary Ball Washington, passed down a famous gingerbread recipe she once served to the Marquis de Lafayette when he visited her home in Fredericksburg. Her recipe is sometimes known as Gingerbread Lafayette and is laced with orange zest and brandy.

Gingerbread for Christmas

Varieties of gingerbread are made in many different countries—pierniki toruńskie in Poland, pepparkakor in Sweden, biber in Switzerland, Parliament cakes in Scotland, marranitos in Mexico, yiyinbre in Panama, and lekach as a traditional Ashkenazi Jewish treat during Rosh Hoshanah, to name a few. And in many of these areas, gingerbread is especially associated with winter holidays.

No one knows for sure why we eat gingerbread at Christmas, but we can take a guess. One thread running through many of these gingerbread traditions is that of giving—whether giving to a friend, lover, or dinner guest, gingerbread captures the spirit of giving at Christmas.

Other associations with Christmas include the exotic spices as representative of the gifts of the Magi, and simply the fact that warm spices go really well with a hot drink in cold weather. Enough associations, and we have a match!

Modern takes on gingerbread include gingerbread lattes, gingerbread cheesecake, and gingerbread Oreos—but the classic, centuries-old tradition of gingerbread will never get old.

Sources

Avey, T. “The History of Gingerbread.” PBS, December 20, 2013. https://www.pbs.org/food/the-history-kitchen/history-gingerbread.

Ball, Aimee Lee. “The (Not Always) Sweet Holiday History of Gingerbread.” Martha Stewart, October 8, 2020. https://www.marthastewart.com/1523540/gingerbread-holiday-history.

Byrne, Anne. “Gingerbread: A True American Cake – No. 128.” Anne Byrne: Between the Layers. https://annebyrn.substack.com/p/gingerbread-a-revolutionary-american.

Chavers, Penny. “Gingerbread Houses and the Men Who Live in Them.” Curious Historian, January 6, 2020. https://curioushistorian.com/gingerbread-houses-and-the-men-who-live-in-them.

Corrigan, Maya. “The Surprisingly Dark History of Gingerbread.” Crime Reads, December 7, 2020. https://crimereads.com/the-surprisingly-dark-history-of-gingerbread.

Cottingham, Karen. “A Comprehensive History of Gingerbread.” The Herb Society of America–South Texas Unit. http://www.herbsociety-stu.org/gingerbread.html.

Fiegl, Amanda. “A Brief History of Gingerbread.” Smithsonian Magazine, December 24, 2008. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/a-brief-history-of-gingerbread-50050265/.

Rolek, Barbara. “The History of Gingerbread.” The Spruce Eats, November 10, 2019. https://www.thespruceeats.com/the-history-of-gingerbread-1135954.

Where Do Vampires Come From?

Where do vampires come from?

The answer takes us on a journey to India, Romania, and Rhode Island, with a pit stop in Forks, Washington.

Vampires in Mythology

Vampires are just one evil mythological creature in a long history of creepy, blood-sucking beings around the world.

Some historians postulate that the concept of vampires stems from a common legend in central Europe/Asia that was dispersed through migrations of Indo-European tribes to different areas of the world. Many cultures have some version of a blood-sucking, humanoid creature:

Ancient Indian scripture contains references to blood-sucking creatures called vetalas and other blood-drinking dark spirits, along with instructions on how to handle them.
The ancient Babylonians, Assyrians, and Hebrews had legends of shapeshifting, blood-drinking demons that roamed the night in search of prey.
Greek and Roman mythology include many vampire-like creatures, such as the Vrykolakas and the Lamia, but they were more likely to eat human flesh rather than drink blood.
West African folklore from the Ashanti tradition tells of the obayifo, a hybrid vampire-witch that inhabits the body of a human being. They use witchcraft to call up spirits and direct them to snatch little children for the obayifo to feed on.
Slavic mythology perhaps has the most well-recognized and well-developed vampire figures. In Russia, the wurdulac is a vampire that must consume the blood of its family members and turn them all into vampires. The Polish vjesci was destined to become a vampire from birth and never really died but rather emerged from the grave to eat their family and friends. Romanian strigoi were spirits that rose from the grave and could transform into an animal, turn invisible, and gain vitality from drinking their victims’ blood.
In Roma folklore, the mullo is an undead vampire that is created when a person does not receive the proper funeral rites. They rise from the dead and get revenge on those who had wronged them by strangling them and sucking their blood.
Ireland and Scotland, true to form, have legends about blood-sucking faeries.
In Trinidad and other Caribbean islands, the soucouyant is a shapeshifting vampire that appears as an old woman by day. She strips off her skin at night and turns into a blue fireball and flies across the sky. She enters her victim’s residence through the window or another hole like a crack or keyhole, then sucks the victim’s blood while they sleep.
Japan has a legend of a serpentine demon called Nure-onna that drinks human blood. With the head of a woman and the body of a snake, she lures her victims to her by pretending she has a small child for them to hold.
In the Philippines, the vampire aswang belongs to a larger group of shapeshifting mythical creatures. It disguises itself as a beautiful woman to lure a man to marry her, then slowly drains out his blood.

As you can see, there are as many variations on vampires as there are stories about them. The single unifying characteristic is that they drink human blood—typically by piercing the victim’s skin with their fangs or by using a long, pointed tongue. The victim then turns into a vampire.

Many have shapeshifting abilities, the most recognizable today being transforming into bats (a tradition that originated in South and Central America). In other traditions they could be found in the guise of an ordinary or very attractive person, a snake, or another animal.

Many of these folklore traditions also contain instructions for preventing the creation of a vampire, warding off attacks from vampires, or destroying vampires. Common tactics include ensuring proper funeral and burial rites have taken place, and killing a vampire often involved brutal methods such as stabbing a stake through the vampire’s heart or burning its body.

Vampire Lore

How to Ward Off a Vampire

Several things are said to ward off vampires, often based on the idea that vampires are corrupt or evil, and religious symbols or forms of folk magic can drive out evil.

Salt—long thought to have purifying properties
Silver—said to ward off evil
Holy water—also purifies the evil out of them
Crosses and other holy symbols—good vs. evil again
Garlic hung in the windows or around one’s neck—because folklore holds vampirism to be caused by a blood infection, garlic’s antibiotic properties antagonize vampires
Running water—based on European legend, running water is blessed and cleaner than stagnant water and was seen as a barrier that prevented unholy beings from crossing

Another interesting deterrent comes from the suggestion that vampires count things compulsively—if you drop a bag of rice on the ground, the vampire is compelled to count every last grain, giving you time to escape.

It also works with snowflakes.

Crossing a Threshold

It is said that vampires cannot enter a person’s home without permission. The vampire might try to trick the homeowner into thinking they are someone else. The idea is that the threshold of the home acted as an energetic or spiritual barrier that withstood the power of the vampire and other external, supernatural forces. Spirits, gods, or ancestors protected the threshold of the house against the intrusion of a vampire. The owner of this metaphysical barrier had to decide that the vampire was not a threat in order to allow him or her to cross the threshold and withdraw the protection that it provided.

Sunlight

In some traditions, vampires operated in normal waking hours; in others, they operated from noon until midnight. In the vast majority of vampire legends, there is no mention of the idea that vampires could not withstand the sun. But Nosferatu introduced the idea that sunlight was toxic to vampires, given that the sun represented the powers of light and goodness in contrast to vampires as creatures of evil and darkness. Now, thanks to Hollywood, vampires in modern fiction are often described as nocturnal, and the sun weakens their powers or even burns them.

How to Kill a Vampire

To kill a vampire, various traditions prescribe driving a wooden stake through its heart, cutting it into pieces and burning it, or otherwise ensuring that the vampire has suffered a gruesome death.

The Vampire Craze

Works of film and literature about vampires have integrated existing vampire lore, then created their own to shape and influence the popular concept of the vampire.

In the mid-1700s, Serbia experienced a “vampire panic,” sparked by reports of dead bodies that refused to decompose or appeared to have fresh bloodstains around the mouth and fueled by anxieties about infectious disease and the living’s proximity to the burial grounds reserved for the dead. The vampire craze spread throughout Eastern Europe.

Literature about vampires began to surface around this time, written in German. When English writers began to write about vampire lore, vampire literature began to take a hold on the public. Robert Southey’s epic poem Thalaba the Destroyer by Robert Southe tells of the title character’s deceased wife, Oneiza, who rises from the dead as a vampire. This was the first appearance of a vampire in English literature.

Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu deserves a place of recognition. Published in 1872, the book tells the tale of the vampire Carmilla who preys upon a young woman visiting an isolated castle. This book, among many others, dealt with themes related to sexuality that often characterize the depiction of monsters in the horror genre (exposing an underlying societal fear of “deviant” sexuality, whether in the form of procreation by vampiric means or preying upon victims).

Another vampire panic emerged during this era, this time in New England. The most well-documented incident occurred in Rhode Island in 1892, when nineteen-year-old Mercy Brown died of tuberculosis—and rose from the dead. So the community thought. Family members believed she had become a vampire and given the disease to her younger brother, so her grave was exhumed to investigate. Due to freezing conditions and storage in an above-ground crypt, her body had not decomposed as expected. Superstition that her heart and liver be burned, and then the ashes mixed with water for her younger brother to drink in order to cure the disease. The Mercy Brown incident shows the powerful hold that monster lore holds over grievous situations of sickness and death.

Dracula

Perhaps nothing popularized the vampire in the modern world as much as Bram Stoker’s gothic horror novel Dracula, published in 1897. It is far from being the first English-language vampire novel, but it is one of the most well-known. It has heavily influenced modern vampire lore and the way vampires were portrayed in later works.

Stoker set the story in Transylvania and drew primarily on Romanian vampire mythology. It was long thought that Count Dracula was modeled after Vlad Dracul, known as Vlad the Impaler. Vlad was a brutal but just ruler in the Walachia region from the years 1456–1462. He’s most famous for fighting off the Ottoman Empire and for impaling his enemies on a wooden stake. Legend has it that he also dined while his victims were dying and dipped his bread in their blood. Count Dracula has many similarities to Vlad the Impaler—both are from Transylvania, both eat the blood of their enemies, both fought against the Turks, and both reference to death by wooden stake. However, scholars now claim that Stoker would not have known about Vlad Dracul and rather came up with the name from a more generic study of cruel and cunning military generals who were given the name Dracula, which, he noted, meant “devil.”

Stoker’s Dracula set some of the “rules” that later vampire stories would follow—such as that vampires fear crucifixes, garlic, and running water, and that vampires can turn into bats. Some of these rules already existed in vampire legends, but there were many that were not included in Dracula. And some were made up.

Dracula as a monster was terrifying because so many things about him were unknown. The fear of other cultures also plays into the horror of Dracula. In the rapidly changing world of the late Industrial Revolution, readers held an underlying anxiety about the unknown future, and Dracula was a personification of this fear. Later works, like Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire, would portray vampires in a more sympathetic and multi-dimensional way.

Nosferatu + More

F.W. Murnau’s silent film Nosferatu also played a role in shaping the general atmosphere surrounding the concept of the vampire, portraying a dark imaginary world characterized by fear and despair. The movie was an unofficial adaptation of Dracula and thus targeted in a copyright lawsuit by the estate of Bram Stoker. (An official, legal adaptation was released the year prior, but it has been lost to history.) Most copies of Nosferatu were destroyed following the lawsuit, but a few have persisted.

Nosferatu's shadow — Iconic shot of Nosferatu’s shadow.
Still frame 1922, via Wikimedia Commons.

Nosferatu took a few artistic liberties with the story—for example, changing the vampire’s name to Count Orlok and showing a vampire killed by sunlight (the first work to do so). It has been analyzed by many as a pre-World War II warning of the threat of aristocratic and authoritarian control, foreshadowing the death and terror that resulted from the Nazi regime.

There have been many other film and theatrical adaptations of Dracula, most notably the 1931 Dracula starring Bela Lugosi. Lugosi’s iconic speech and mannerisms brought the Count to life for audiences, and his performance created the template for future portrayals of vampires. His slicked-back hair, his formal attire and raised collar cape, his intense and aristocratic bearing, and his Hungarian accent (passing as Transylvanian) are ingrained in the collective modern image of the vampire.

Bela Lugosi as Dracula. — Bela Lugosi as Count Dracula.
Photograph 1921, Universal Studios, via Wikimedia Commons.

Other Popular Culture

The 1976 novel Interview with a Vampire by Anne Rice and the film based on it revived the vampire genre. It showed the vampire as a complex villain capable of emotion and romantic longings, often suave and charismatic rather than aloof and creepy—similar to vampires in later series like The Vampire Diaries. Twilight, a vampire romance set in Forks, Washington, set off a vampire/werewolf craze in young adult fiction.

The 1990s TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer took a slightly different take on the vampire. Some of their faces transform into monstrous forms, and when they are killed, they turn to dust. Buffy also took on the monster as a metaphor for real fears that were evident in the characters’ teenage lives.

The Vampire as a Metaphor

One thing that all of these stories show to us is the nature of human fears. Sometimes, it’s easier to imagine a monster in order to understand and confront the anxieties of real life. Whether we are afraid of proximity to death, authoritarian rule, sexual deviancy, or high school heartbreak, driving a stake through the shadowy figure of the vampire is one way to deal with it.

As Bram Stoker observed in Dracula, “No man knows till he has suffered from the night how sweet and dear to his heart and eye the morning can be.”

So where do vampires come from? They are created from our own fears.

Sources

Davis, Lauren. “No, Bram Stoker Did Not Model Dracula on Vlad the Impaler.” Gizmodo, October 21, 2104. https://gizmodo.com/no-bram-stoker-did-not-model-dracula-on-vlad-the-impal-1648969679.

Elkridge, Hannah. “Vampire.” Encyclopaedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/vampire.

Hallam, Lindsey. “Nosferatu at 100: how the seminal vampire film shaped the horror genre.” The Conversation, March 18, 2022. https://theconversation.com/nosferatu-at-100-how-the-seminal-vampire-film-shaped-the-horror-genre-179439.

History.com Editors. “Vampire History.” History, February 21, 2021. https://www.history.com/topics/folklore/vampire-history.

Klein, Annika Baranti. “Dracula in Pop Culture.” Book Riot, May 26, 2022. https://bookriot.com/dracula-in-pop-culture/.

L, Miranda. “Vampires in South America.” Great Gothic Giggle, March 28, 2019. https://greatgothicgiggle.home.blog/2019/03/28/vampires-in-south-america/.

Mumford, Tracy. “The Long, Bloody History of Vampires in Literature.” MPRNews, January 12, 2016. https://www.mprnews.org/story/2016/01/12/books-first-vampire-in-literature.

Nanos, Janelle. “Where Do Vampires Come From?” National Geographic, February 23, 2010. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/where_do_vampires_come_from.

Wikipedia. “Vampire Folklore by Region.” Retrieved October 10, 2022, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire_folklore_by_region.

Wilson, Karina. “Decomposing Bodies in the 1720s Gave Birth to the First Vampire Panic.” Smithsonian Magazine, October 23, 2020. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/decomposing-bodies-1720s-gave-birth-first-vampire-panic-180976097/.

Where Did the Continents Get Their Names?

Where did each of the seven continents get their names? The answer involves the sunrise and sunset, a big bear and a little bear, and three mythological queens.

Africa

Africa is the oldest inhabited territory on the planet. Many peoples of Africa, including the Ethiopians, Nubians, Moors, and Numidians, anciently referred to the landmass as Alkebulan—a name that meant “mother of mankind.” Other peoples variously called it Corphye, Ortigia, Libya, or Ethiopia.

The name Africa came about from ancient Romans and Greeks who sought to describe the lands across the Mediterranean Sea—and who generalized from their experience of only a small part of the continent.

There are several possible origins for the name Africa:

Afri was the name of a tribe native to Libya that become the Latin word used to describe all the inhabitants of northern Africa west of the Nile. It originates from the Berber word ifri, meaning “cave” and designating the Afri as cave dwellers. The Latin suffix -ica (or possibly -terra) was then added to denote “a land.”

The Greek word aphrike means the land “without cold.”

The Roman word aprica means “sunny.”

The Phoenicians may have called it the “land of corn and fruit,” or friqi and pharika.

The Arabic word afar (“dust”) or afir (“dried up by the sun”) may have been the root that led to the words afara (“to be dusty”) and afrīqā.

Additional theories attempt to trace the name of Africa, but the most sound of those known today is the Latin Afri-ica.

Europe

Like the other continents, there are several theories as to the origin of the name Europe.

The first and most common is that it comes from Europa of Greek mythology. Europa was a Phoenician princess who was abducted by Zeus in the form of a bull. She had three sons with him, including King Minos of Crete. In Greek thought, lands and rivers were often associated with female figures or watched over by a goddess, making Europa the patron of the European continent. Europa as a geographic term is first found in a Homeric Hymn to Delian Apollo, referencing the western shore of the Aegean Sea.

Europa and the Bull – Red-Figure Stamnos, Tarquinia Museum, ca. 480 BCE.
Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Europa comes from the words eurus, meaning “wide, broad,” and ops, meaning “eye, face, countenance.” Together, the word indicates a broad countenance. Words meaning broad had been used as an epithet for the Earth as a divine figure in Proto-Indo-European religion.

Another theory seeks a Semitic root for Europe. The Akkadian term erebu, meaning “west” and therefore an association with sunset, may have been the origin for Europe. Europe was the land of the setting sun, in contrast to asu, the “east” or “country of sunrise.”

Asia

As mentioned previously, the land of Asia may have been named Asu for the word for “east” or “sunrise.”

However, there are other proposed etymologies. The concept of Asia came from Greek civilization, which divided the world then known to them into Europe, Asia, and Libya. It was thought that these three names all derived from Greek queens: Europa (Princess of Phoenicia who had a relationship with Zeus), Asia (a nymph or titan who was married to Prometheus, the god of fire), and Libya (Queen Libya or Lamia of Egypt, who bore two sons with Poseidon).

The ancient Greek word asia was first used to refer to the eastern bank of the Aegean Sea as well as the region of Anatolia. The Romans used this term to refer to Lydia. It is thought that asia came from the Aegean word asis, meaning “muddy” as a descriptor of the shores of the Aegean Sea. A Hittite group of 22 ancient states in Asia Minor formed a confederation called Assuwa, which may have been informed by the existing word asia.

In eastern Asia, Chinese, Korean, and Mongol civilizations, among others, had their own names for their territory. Asia was later extended to include all of the continent of Asia we know today.

North and South America

The indigenous peoples of the Americas each had a name for the place they called home. The Mohawk people called it “Anowara:kowa,” meaning the Great Turtle. The Wendat likewise may have referred to the land with a word meaning Turtle Island—both owing to a rich mythological tradition that viewed the earth as a turtle that rose from the sea. The Mexica nation knew the land of North America as Anahuac, which means “close to us.” This signifies the deep connection between the land and the people’s hearts and kinship ties. Further, in some areas of South America, Abya Yala was the term used for the land, and it means “Land of Full Maturity,” “Land of Life,” or “Fruitful Land.”

During the Age of Exploration, Spanish explorers initially referred to this area as the Indies, believing incorrectly that it was part of eastern Asia.

The name that was eventually given to these indigenous lands by European conquerors was the Americas, after Amerigo Vespucci. Vespucci was an Italian merchant and navigator who set sail for the lands across the Atlantic from 1497 to 1504, landing in what is now Brazil. He embarked on two voyages under the flags of Portugal and Spain and purportedly produced two brochures with fantastical descriptions of the lands he explored. Though these accounts have been called into question, they were important for raising awareness about the “New World,” as he called it.

At the time, Vespucci explored what is now South America. Most of North America was still unknown to Europeans. In 1507, the cartographer Martin Waldseemüller honored Vespucci’s accomplishments by naming these lands America, using a Latinized form of Amerigo. Waldseemüller produced a long-awaited world map that updated geographic knowledge following from the Age of Exploration. Later cartographers followed suit, and the landmass was officially named America by 1532. Vespucci likely didn’t even know about Waldseemüller’s map before his death in 1507. However, many supporters of Christopher Columbus at the time felt that the continents of the New World should have been named after him and that Vespucci or his supporters had stolen the spotlight.

The Italian name Amerigo means “home ruler.” The Spanish name Colón, or Columbus, means “dove.” Neither one adequately expresses what the New World was to the European settlers—it was not their home, and it surely was not a place of peace.

In the English-speaking world, America was used to refer to the entire landmass from Canada to Chile, which was considered a single continent. This served the United States’ geopolitical interests as it sought to dominate the Western Hemisphere. It wasn’t until the 1950s that geographers in the United States insisted on separating North America and South America.

Today, some indigenous peoples in America—who peopled these lands long before European explorers, conquistadors, and colonizers stepped foot—object to the term Americas. In 1977, the World Council of Indigenous Peoples (Consejo Mundial de Pueblos Indígenas) proposed using the indigenous term Abya Yala instead of America when referring to the continent as an objection to colonialism.

Australia

There is no one Aboriginal term for the landmass of Australia. Rather, hundreds of linguistically diverse tribes named various places where they lived and interacted.

When the landmass was settled by the Dutch, they began to call it New Holland. English settlers tried to give it the name New South Wales.

The name Australia is derived from the Latin term australis, meaning “southern” in reference to the auster, the south wind. A theory in early pre-modern geography held that a vast continent known as Terra Australis was yet to be discovered in the far south of the globe. The idea was that there must be landmasses in the southern half of the globe to balance out the landmasses in the northern half.

The hypothetical continent of Terra Australis had yet to be confirmed, so botanists and explorers began applying the term to a continent that had been discovered in the southern hemisphere. The English explorer Matthew Flinders most famously used the name Australia in 1804, and it became the continent’s official name in 1817.

The geographic region of Oceania, named for several landmasses in the Pacific Ocean, is sometimes regarded as a continent rather than Australia. It includes Australia, New Zealand, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia.

Antarctica

Maori oral histories tell of a crew of explorers led by Hui Te Rangiora who navigated the Antarctic waters in the seventh century, describing the unfamiliar appearance of icebergs as jagged rocks that grew out of the sea and snow as powdered arrowroot. In January 1820, a team of explorers further proved the existence of Terra Australis: a Russian expedition caught sight of an ice shelf, and later that year, American explorers set foot on the continent.

Map of the hypothetical Antarctic region, 1657.
Jan Janssonius (1588–1664), Geheugen van Nederland, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Greek cartographer Marinus of Tyre called this hypothetical landmass Antarctica as early as the second century BCE. The word Antarctica comes from the Greek anti- and arktos. In the Northern Hemisphere, the constellations Ursa Major and Ursa Minor (ursa being the Latin word for “bear”) point to the North Star. The northernmost part of the world, the Arctic Circle, was named for the great and little bears.

Antarctica thus means “opposite the bear”—it is opposite (anti) the Arctic. On a related note, the Arctic is home to polar bears, while Antarctica has penguins but no bears.

The continent first received its official name as early as 1840 in a conference of Italian scientists, and the term was adapted for used in English, French, and other languages.

Sources

Joyce Chepkemoi, “How Did Australia Get Its Name?” World Atlas, October 3, 2017. https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/how-did-australia-get-its-name.html.

Antonia Čirjak, “What Was the Original Name of Africa?” World Atlas, June 16, 2020. https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/what-was-the-original-name-of-africa.html.

Sabrina Imbler, “The Maori Vision of Antarctica’s Future,” New York Times, July 2, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/02/science/antarctica-maori-exploration.html.

Rotich Kiptoo Victor, “What Are the Origins of the Names Arctic and Antarctica?” World Atlas, April 24, 2018. https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/what-are-the-origins-of-the-names-arctic-and-antarctica.html.

Wikipedia, “History of Antarctica,” “Europa: Consort of Zeus,” “Africa,” “Asia,” “List of Continent Name Etymologies,” “Naming of the Americas.” Accessed September 2022.

Rubber Duckie, You’re the One

What exactly is the function of a rubber duck? The answer involves debtor’s prison, hunting practice, and the Billboard 100.

From birth to age two, children often experience fear surrounding bath time, and the bright, playful stimulus of bath toys like rubber ducks can soothe them and help them overcome their resistance. Rubber ducks encourage water play that helps with coordination, stimulate the senses with bright colors and quacking noises, and just make taking a bath more fun. But have you ever wondered why the rubber duck has such a hold on the bath toy scene?

Rubber

The earliest rubber duck was created in the late 1800s, but before the duck came the rubber. Charles Goodyear was born in 1800 in Connecticut and worked as a hardware merchant. When he encountered rejection in his attempt to sell hardware to the Roxbury India Rubber Company in New York, it sparked an idea that would change the rubber industry forever. Bad weather had destroyed much of Roxbury’s rubber stocks, leaving them in a financial crunch. Goodyear, who was also in dire financial straits, found himself with a lot of time on his hands in debtor’s prison and began to experiment with gum elastic. He rolled out raw rubber over and over with a pin to get the right consistency, and once out of prison, he continued to perfect his solution by adding minerals to prevent stickiness and make it malleable.

In 1839, Goodyear accidentally dropped a rubber and sulphur solution into a stove and observed that it didn’t melt. He had succeeded. The process of rendering rubber into a malleable, weather-proof, heat-resistant material was called vulcanization, and Goodyear’s innovation has inspired generations of manufacturers. When brothers Frank and Charles Seiberling opened a tire company in 1898, they named it in honor of Charles Goodyear.

Ducky

Near the end of the 1800s, inventors began to make small rubber objects, as evidenced by patents filed with the U.S. Patent Office. The first ones were chew toys made of hard, solid rubber that didn’t float.

The first patent for a “Rubber Decoy Duck” was filed in 1886 by George H. Nye. It wasn’t a toy but was intended for use in hunting. Previously, decoy ducks were made of wood and were easily breakable. Nye’s new rubber-and-wood combination was more durable.

Rubber duck patent diagram — Diagram from Peter Ganine’s rubber duck patent.

Later came rubber toys that made squeaking noises, and it was only a matter of time before the rubber duck was patented in 1928. Early rubber ducks had propellers or sprayed water like a sprinkler. But the rubber duck that caught on most rapidly was a simple rubber toy with no extra functions; it was purely for play. Following World War II, Russian-American sculptor Peter Ganine’s plain rubber duck design was immensely popular. In the 1960s, when patents on the rubber duck expired, the now-cheaper model became a bathroom staple for households across the country.

In 1970, the song “Rubber Duckie” debuted on Sesame Street when the orange muppet Ernie sang the tune to his favorite bath toy. This song made an icon out of the rubber duck and peaked at no. 16 on Billboard’s Top 100. Because of Ernie’s tubside tune, the rubber duck is now seen as the quintessential bath toy.

You’re the One

Though modern rubber ducks are actually made out of vinyl rather than rubber, the rubber duck has become an icon worldwide. Collectors seek out the most unique rubber ducks, rubber duck derbies pit the bath toys against each other in a race, and classic rubber duckies are found during bath time in many a household. The rubber duck was even inducted into the Toy Hall of Fame in 2013.

Rubber ducks racing in a river — Rubber duck race in Freiburg, Germany.
Image by Andreas Schwarzkopf, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

In 2001, a maintenance worker gave an insider’s view of Buckingham Palace, where Queen Elizabeth has her own royal rubber duck, complete with an inflatable crown. This story caused a sensation and led to an 80% increase in sales of rubber ducks in Great Britain.

And just look at the largest rubber duck in the world. At a whopping 50-feet tall, it was created by Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman in New Zealand, debuted at a festival in Sydney, Australia, and has embarked on an international tour.

Big rubber duck in Sydney harbor — *Rubber Duck* by Florentijn Horman
Image by Eva Rinaldi, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

Rubber duckie, you do make bath time lots of fun!

Sources

Jones, Lydia. “The History of the Rubber Duck.” B1 Creative, October 4, 2021. https://b1creative.com/2021/10/04/the-history-of-the-rubber-duck/.

Meyer, Lotte Larsen. “Rubber Ducks and Their Significance in Contemporary American Culture,” The Journal of American Culture, vol. 29, no. 1 (2006): 14–23.

Rossen, Jake. “Wise Quacks: The History of the Rubber Duck.” Mental Floss, January 13, 2019.

The Strong National Museum of Play. “Rubber Duck.” https://www.museumofplay.org/toys/rubber-duck/.

Round Robin

Why is a tournament where each team plays the other in turn called a round robin? The answer involves ribbons, religious refugees, and ringleaders.

What Does Red Robin Mean?

Round robin very generally means something that operates in a rotational manner. It is specifically used for tournaments (in sports or games) where each team or player plays every other, a circulating letter where each subsequent person adds information to the document, or any other situation that involves the participation of each person in a group in turn.

Other Meanings of Red Robin

But before round robin referred to a rotational arrangement, it was a term of disparagement, dating back to the sixteenth century. In 1546, Miles Coverdale wrote,

Certayne fonde [foolish] talkers… applye to this mooste holye sacramente, names of despitte and reproche, as to call it Jake in the boxe, and round roben, and suche other not onely fond but also blasphemouse names.

Round robin also had a variety of other meanings, including supporters of the English Parliament during the country’s civil war, some type of recreational game, and a playful alliterative term for anything round in shape. None of these necessarily had any relation to the robin as a bird.

Origins of Red Robin

Merriam-Webster lists the first known usage of round robin given its current meaning in 1698. It was first used in the British Royal Navy in reference to a petition of grievances or letter of protest on which the participants signed their names in a circle, like the spokes on a wheel, so that the recipient would not know who signed first. It was regarded as primarily a nautical term, but by the 1730s, even landlubbers—primarily government officials—sent around petitions round-robin style to protect the ringleader from discovery.

Fake Etymology, Real History

Some sources claim that the term comes from the French ruban rond (“round ribbon”), which was likewise a petition where names were written on a circle of ribbon. This is plausible; however, there is no documentary evidence to support this. It’s also been asserted that ringleader stems from the leader of a round robin petition where people signed their names in a ring, but again, there is little concrete evidence for this etymology.

However, history does indicate a French origin story. The round robin petition may have had its beginnings in France in 1621 with a petition signed by 56 Huguenot refugees. The Huguenots were Protestants who suffered severe persecution from the Catholic majority in France during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These 56 signatories and their families had fled from France to Leiden in Holland. They were now petitioning to settle in the British colony of Virginia. The Walloon Jesse de Forest presented the round-robin petition to the British Ambassador Sir Dudley Carlton, but his request was only granted with such strict parameters that he decided against it. Later, 32 families sailed from Holland to the area known as New Netherland—helping form the beginnings of what would become New York.

The meaning of round robin as applied to a tournament first appeared in the United States in the early 1800s. Though no secrecy or petitions of grievance are involved, the term round robin has expanded to capture the idea of any kind of rotational procedure.

Sources

Butterfield, Jeremy. “Round Robins and Folk Etymology.” Jeremy Butterfield Editorial. https://jeremybutterfield.wordpress.com/2020/06/10/round-robins-and-folk-etymology/.

Grammarist. “Round Robin.” https://grammarist.com/usage/round-robin/.

Merriam-Webster online dictionary. “Round robin.” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/round-robin.

The Phrase Finder. “The Meaning and Origin of the Expression: Round Robin.” https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/round-robin.html.

I Threw a Wish in a Well

Why do we throw coins into fountains and wells in hopes of a wish being granted? The answer involves the law of contagion, a supermarket for the poor, and the undying hope of humanity.

Many cultures regard water as a gift from the gods. In a desert where water means survival, in an agricultural society where water is necessary to grow crops, and in any place where humans make a home—water is necessary for life. Drinkable water is relatively rare, so wells were built to protect sources of clean water. Various beliefs cropped up regarding the sacred and divine powers of the well, especially in European cultures. Some wells collected coins, food, or clothing as an offering of gratitude to the gods for drinkable water. Some became shrines to deities. Some became places of rest and repose for weary travelers.

Some wells were thought to have healing powers, and the sick person would toss in a piece of their clothing in hopes to be cured of their disease. A concept called the law of contagion explains this superstition—it was believed that the clothing not only carried the disease but represented the person’s disease. It acted as a token of a non-material bond with the person it belonged to and became a vehicle for the healing powers of the well’s resident deity or natural forces. The curative powers of water would transfer from the button or scrap of fabric in the well to the sick person. This same psychological law is in effect (in a negative way) when someone feels disgusted at the idea of wearing an item of clothing that once belonged to someone they dislike, or (in a positive way) when you don’t want to wash your hands after shaking the hand of someone famous.

Some wells became places of prayer and offerings of money. A well in Northumberland, England, was anciently a site of prayer and offerings in the form of coins to the Coventina, the Celtic goddess of wells and springs. An archaeological dig turned up about 16,000 coins from various eras of the Roman empire, most of them of lower value. The exchange value of the coins didn’t seem to weight the odds of the wish or prayer being granted more heavily in the person’s favor. Excavations of other wells have turned up similar results—vast numbers of coins of lower denominations, the result of people tossing in a coin as an offering as they say a prayer to a deity or plead with a supernatural power. Though wells have largely lost their connection to a particular deity, this practice persists in the form of making a wish as one tosses a coin into a well, fountain, or other source of water.

Site of Coventina's Well — Standing stone marking the site of Coventina’s Well.
Image by Mike Quinn CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

And we just can’t resist it! Throwing a coin into a wishing well or a fountain is an exercise in hope. Exchanging money for a wish directs our sense of control when our desires are unlikely or uncertain to be fulfilled. Similarly to the law of contagion at work in the diseased person’s clothing, the coin you throw in a well is an extension of yourself and your wish. Anthropologist Peter Wogan explains that when you release the coin, you release control to the water, the life force of the universe, to grant your wish. And when you look into the water, you see the coins of so many others whose wishes—superstitious or ironic or playful or secretly hopeful—led them to the well, just like you. This creates, from a private, unspoken dream, a sense of collective belonging with the hundreds of others.

One of the most famous fountains is the Trevi Fountain in Rome. It was built as the endpoint of an aqueduct called Virgo in honor of the goddess who guided those who were tired and thirsty to water. Originally, legend had it that drinking a glass of water from the fountain would lead to good fortune, good health, and a quick return to Rome. Now, drinking the water isn’t recommendable, but throwing a coin over with your right hand over your left shoulder into the fountain is said to guarantee that you will return to Rome someday. This idea was further popularized by the 1954 movie Three Coins in the Fountain, which also promised that throwing two coins in meant falling in love with a Roman, and tossing in three coins meant that you would marry that person. Cue an insane number of tourists who wished for a Roman love interest.

What happens to all those coins? Often, the money goes to charity or toward the upkeep of the fountain or well. For example, tens of thousands of dollars in change are gathered in fountains and wells in Walt Disney World in Florida, and the proceeds are used to support foster children in the state. (You may not think your nickel is worth much, but aggregated with every other park visitor’s change, it adds up—and makes a difference for good!)

In New York City, Parks and Recreation staff clean the city’s 50+ decorative fountains every few weeks, and any change collected goes toward upkeep of the fountains themselves. However, there is usually not much to collect—usually, people take the coins before the Parks staff get to cleaning.

In Rome, so many tourists throw coins into the Trevi Fountain that it must be cleaned every night. The BBC reported that the fountains collect $4,000 in loose change from tourists every day—and authorities are tough on anyone caught skimming off coins from the fountain. The money goes to a charity organization called Caritas for such projects as running a supermarket for the needy and distributing goods to the poor.

Whether you’re wishing for eternal youth, a vacation to Italy, or a call from someone special (maybe?)—the wishing well is a spring of hope for you and a source of charitable donations for others.

Sources

Lewis, Danny. “What Happens to Coins Tossed in Fountains?” Smithsonian Magazine, June 6, 2016. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/heres-what-happens-all-coins-tossed-fountains-180959314/.

Tabila, Lauren, James Green, Jonathan Kwok, Kara Thurn, and Meagan McLaughlin. “Wishing Wells: The Practice of Buying Good Fortune.” University of California–Irvine. http://www.anthropology.uci.edu/~wmmaurer/courses/anthro_money_2006/wishing.html.

Upton, Emily. “Why We Throw Coins into Fountains.” Today I Found Out, March 10, 2014. https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2014/03/throw-coins-fountains/.

Wogan, Peter. “Why Do We Throw Coins in Fountains?” Greater Good Magazine, January 26, 2017. https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/why_do_we_throw_coins_in_fountains.

Who Was St. Patrick?

Who was St. Patrick? The answer involves pirates, snakes, and revelatory dreams.

St. Patrick mosaic — Saint Patrick Catholic Church
(Junction City, Ohio)
Image via Wikimedia Commons.

St. Patrick is one of the most widely known Christian saints and the patron saint of Ireland. But not much is definitively known about his life. He was not the one who introduced Christianity to Ireland, as is sometimes claimed. Nor does he have much to do with luck or leprechauns. And in fact, he wasn’t even Irish!

Patrick was born in Roman Britain near the end of the fourth century. His family was either of indigenous Celtic descent or from Rome. He signed his name Patricius in Latin, but according to some accounts his birth name was Maewyn Succat. Although Patrick’s family wasn’t particularly religious, his father became a Christian deacon in order to benefit from tax incentives.

When Patrick was sixteen, he was abducted by Irish pirates who attacked and raided his family’s estate. They took him to Ireland and imprisoned him for six years in County Mayo near Killala, where he worked as a shepherd. Alone and separated from his family and his country, Patrick turned inward and found solace in his religion. He began to dream of converting the Irish people to Christianity. He continued to receive revelation through dreams and, after six years as a prisoner, heard God’s voice telling him it was time to leave Ireland. He walked 200 miles to the Irish coast and escaped to Britain.

Later, he had another revelation in a dream, where he saw a figure called Victorious who offered him a letter titled “The Voice of the Irish.” In the dream, Patrick was deeply moved by a company of Irish people imploring him to return, and he felt called to go back to Ireland as a missionary. He began training to become a priest and spent 15 years in religious study before he was ordained. Despite the lengthy time he took in filling his educational gaps, he still felt inadequate for the task that lay ahead of him. But once he had embarked for Ireland, he was filled with confidence and determination for his cause—to minister to Christians already there and to convert the Irish. (He did not introduce Christianity to Ireland, as is commonly believed, but he played the largest role in converting the Irish people to Christianity.) Patrick had great success and baptized and confirmed many people into the Christian faith.

He dealt carefully with local authorities and non-Christians, but he was cast into prison at least once and was in constant peril of martyrdom. Those he converted, too, were at times in danger. In his Letter to Coroticus, Patrick denounces the British mistreatment toward Irish Christians and bids those who have died farewell. In his autobiography, Confessio, he humbly poured forth thanks to his Maker for his success in helping the Irish become “people of God.” One scholar stated that “The moral and spiritual greatness of the man shines through every stumbling sentence of his ‘rustic’ Latin.”

Patrick was able to reach so many people in large part due to his familiarity with Irish language and culture. Instead of attempting to wipe out traditional Irish beliefs, Patrick instead incorporated elements of Irish ritual into Christianity. The Irish celebrated their gods with fire, so Easter celebrations included a bonfire. The Irish used the symbol of the sun in their native worship practices, so Patrick superimposed an image of the sun onto the cross, creating what is known as the Celtic cross. This helped the Irish converts understand the underlying similarities between the light of the sun and the light of Christ and incorporate Christianity more naturally into their lives. According to legend, Patrick used the three-leafed shamrock to explain the concept of the Trinity—and though this story is not based in fact, it illustrates St. Patrick’s creativity, passion, and understanding of the Irish people.

Modern Celtic cross of a war monument in Limburg-Dietkirchen, Germany.
Image by Volker Thies via Wikimedia Commons.

In this country with a rich tradition of oral storytelling, Patrick’s life and mission was expanded and exaggerated over the centuries. Other legends hold that Patrick drove all the snakes in Ireland into the sea to their utter destruction, and that is why there are no snakes on the Emerald Isle. One story reports that Patrick prayed for food for a starving group of sailors traveling over land, and a herd of pigs miraculously appeared to sustain them.

In the later years of his life, Patrick retired to Saul, the site of his first church, and died on March 17, 460 AD. He was never formally canonized by the Catholic Church simply because there was no canonization process during the first millennium. Rather, he was almost by default proclaimed a saint due to his widespread popularity. He is widely known as the patron saint of Ireland, and Irish Catholics seek his protection and intercession.

The Feast of Saint Patrick is held on March 17 as a religious celebration. It was traditionally a solemn affair in Ireland, a day of holy obligation and silent prayer rather than rollicking and revelry. Until the late twentieth century, St. Patrick’s Day was actually more widely celebrated in the Irish diaspora than in Ireland itself—most prominently in North America and Australia, where there are large numbers of people with Irish heritage. Starting in the 1700s, Irish immigrants in America began to incorporate celebration of the culture and heritage of the Irish in general on St. Patrick’s Day. Parades and parties, music and dancing now characterized a celebration of Irish pride, and outside Ireland, St. Patrick’s Day has focused mainly on more secular aspects of Irish culture. Many people take this as a day to wear as much green as humanly possible, hunt for four-leaf clovers, and drink green beer. Ireland only began to incorporate these types of festivities beginning in the 1970s.

St. Patrick has become nearly synonymous with Ireland. As we celebrate St. Patrick’s Day and honor Irish heritage, let’s also incorporate his humility and deep respect for Irish culture without resorting to stereotypes.

Sources

Biography.com Editors. “Saint Patrick.” Biography.com, April 20, 2021. https://www.biography.com/religious-figure/saint-patrick.

Cohen, Jennie. “St. Patrick’s Day Legends and Myths Debunked.” History. Com, March 8, 2022. https://www.history.com/news/st-patricks-day-myths-debunked.

History.com Editors. “Who Was St. Patrick?” History.com, March 10, 2021. https://www.history.com/topics/st-patricks-day/who-was-saint-patrick.

O’Raifeartaigh, Tarlach. “Saint Patrick.” Encyclopaedia Brittanica. Retrieved March 26, 2022, from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-Patrick.

“St. Patrick.” Catholic Online. Retrieved March 25, 2022, from https://www.catholic.org/saints/saint.php?saint_id=89.

Who Was Saint Valentine?

We celebrate Valentine’s Day in honor of Saint Valentine every year on February 14th—but who is the legend behind the holiday?

The answer is uncertain, really, but it involves miraculous healing, secret marriage ceremonies, and beekeeping.

The Many Saint Valentines

Various accounts of Saint Valentine seem to overlap and intersect with one another. There are about 500 recorded stories about a saint named Valentine. There were likely two Christian martyrs who made a name for Saint Valentine, and the legendary stories associated with them were merged into one. Historians agree that there may be little actual historical basis for some of these accounts, while others may be exaggerated versions of real events.

And what’s more, there were actually about twelve saints with the name Valentine. Valentinus, the Latin word for worthy, strong, or powerful, was a common name between the second and eighth centuries.

The Roman Priest Who Secretly Performed Marriages

In one account, Valentine was a priest in third-century Rome during the reign of Emperor Claudius II. Claudius outlawed marriage for young men, reasoning that men with no wives or children would be a better asset for the Roman military. Valentine saw the injustice of this decree and began to perform marriages for young Christian couples in secret. These clandestine ceremonies meant that the married men could not be pressed into military service, thereby depleting Claudius’s potential forces. Was Valentine trying to show the emperor that not even the military can conquer love—or is this the story of how Valentine aided in draft-dodging to weaken an empire that was hostile to his people?

Christians were a small and persecuted minority in Europe during this time. Valentine also aided many of his fellow believers in escaping the harsh sentences they faced in Roman prisons, where they were tortured and beaten.

These were serious crimes against the Roman Empire, and when Claudius found out, he ordered that Valentine be put to death. Claudius offered one way out: Valentine could renounce his faith. The priest refused, choosing rather to suffer his own torture and imprisonment, and he was beheaded on February 14. (The year is uncertain, but it was somewhere around 269–280). Valentine’s compassion, integrity, and heroic actions in the face of persecution sealed his fate as a Christian martyr.

Before he was killed, though, he fell in love with a young woman, possibly the jailor’s daughter, who visited him during his confinement. He sent her a note signed, “From your Valentine”—meaning that the first valentine greeting was from the saint himself.

Stained glass image of Saint Valentine blessing a young couple — Saint Valentine blessing a young couple.

Another account from the same period places Valentine as the Bishop of Terni. Valentine was placed under arrest in the house of Judge Asterius for the crime of attempting to convert people to Christianity. The judge and the bishop engaged in debate over religion to pass the time. As Valentine continued to pledge his faith to his captor, Asterius decided to put him to the test. He presented Valentine with his daughter, who was blind, and, with a guarded hope and desperation, asked him to heal her. Valentine placed his hands on her eyes and restored her sight. Judge Asterius, in awe, broke all the idols in his house and fasted for three days, and then he and his entire 44-person household were baptized as Christians. He also ordered the release of all Christian prisoners nearby.

Valentine was later imprisoned again, and this time, he was sentenced to death by beheading on February 14. Before he died, he sent a letter to Asterius’s daughter whom he had healed, signed “Your Valentine.” (Or perhaps she was the one who sent him the letter.) Sound familiar?

Both Valentines are said to have been buried at Ponte Milvio along the Via Flaminia, and since the year 496, a feast has been held in honor of Saint Valentine on February 14. However, the Roman Catholic Church removed Saint Valentine from its calendar in 1969 due to the lack of reliable information on his life.

Beekeeping

Today, Valentine is still honored as the patron saint of love, engaged couples, and happy marriages . . . as well as epilepsy, beekeeping, fainting, and the plague.

Saint Valentine healing a man with epiliepsy — Saint Valentine blessing a man with epilepsy. Colored etching.
Wellcome Library, London. CC BY 4.0.

It’s not clear how all these associations came about. But let’s talk about beekeeping for a moment. One of Saint Valentine’s duties in the afterlife is to maintain the sweetness of honey, that bee colonies flourish, and that . Bees have long been associated with goddesses of love, like Aphrodite, Venus, or Gwen. Myths from ancient Greece and Rome portray bees as having romantic effects on humans. Honey has been used as an aphrodisiac and medicinal agent for thousands of years, and its sweet taste represents love and healing. Beekeepers, then, can represent the guardians of love in family and marital relationships.

All this is to say that Valentine watches over the protectors of love. But also the plague.

So Why Do We Celebrate Valentine’s Day?

Our friend Geoffrey Chaucer, author of the Canterbury Tales, was the first to associate the feast day of Saint Valentine with romantic love.

In his poem “Parlement of Foules,” Chaucer wrote,

For this was on seynt Volantynys day

Whan euery foul comyth there to chese his make.

Those lovebirds were looking for a match on Valentine’s Day. Chaucer was perhaps referring to the feast day of St. Valentine of Genoa on May 3, which is when birds are more likely to mate. But people took the 14th of February and ran with it.

Medieval folks had gone crazy for stories of courtly love and especially stories of forbidden or secret relationships. Now, young lovers called upon Saint Valentine for a blessing on their relationship, finding romance and excitement from the tales of secret marriages performed under his hand. In France, February 14th became a day of feasting, singing, and dancing in honor of romantic love. The French and the English penned love letters to their “valentines,” and Shakespeare’s Ophelia pines,

To-morrow is Saint Valentine’s day,

All in the morning betime,

And I a maid at your window,

To be your Valentine.

The legendary name of Valentine is now shorthand for romantic love and all the excitement and disappointment, butterflies and heartbreak that come with it. But perhaps we can remember a different type of Valentine—the type who is willing to sacrifice his own life out of a deep commitment to his faith and love for others, the type who courageously performs acts of compassion during times of oppression.

Sources

Barry, Anna Maria. “A History of Valentine’s Day Celebrations—From Fertility Festivals to the First Cards.” History Extra, February 10, 2021. https://www.historyextra.com/period/modern/when-was-valentines-day-first-celebrated-cards-history-saint-valentine/.

Gershon, Livia. “Who Was the Real Saint Valentine? The Many Myths Behind the Inspiration for Valentine’s Day.” History.com. https://www.history.com/news/real-st-valentine-medieval.

Harris, Karen. “Saint Valentine: The Patron Saint Of Bees, Fainting, And The Actual Plague.” History Extra. https://historydaily.org/saint-valentine-patron-saint-bees-fainting-actual-plague.

History.com Editors. “History of Valentine’s Day.” History.com, January 24, 2022. https://www.history.com/topics/valentines-day/history-of-valentines-day-2.

“Saint Valentine—Patron Saint of Beekeepers and Lovers.” Glory Bee, February 14, 2017. https://glorybee.com/blog/saint-valentine-patron-saint-of-beekeepers-and-lovers/.

“St. Valentine.” Catholic Online. Retrieved February 11, 2022, from https://www.catholic.org/saints/saint.php?saint_id=159.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Saint Valentine.” Retrieved February 11, 2022, from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-Valentine.

Pre-Julian Calendars

The Julian Calendar

The Gregorian Calendar

The Change of 1752

The Spread of the Gregorian Calendar

Other Calendar Systems

Reckoning with Time

The Origin of Christmas Stockings

Stocking Stuffers

Good Kids Get Oranges and Naughty Kids Get Coal, Right?

What Is Gingerbread?

Ginger and Bread

Gingerbread in Europe

Gingerbread around the World

Gingerbread Men in England

Gingerbread Houses in Germany

Uncle Sam’s Gingerbread

Gingerbread for Christmas

Vampires in Mythology

Vampire Lore

How to Ward Off a Vampire

Crossing a Threshold

Sunlight

How to Kill a Vampire

The Vampire Craze

Dracula

Nosferatu + More

Other Popular Culture

The Vampire as a Metaphor

Africa

Europe

Asia

North and South America

Australia

Antarctica

Rubber

Ducky

You’re the One

What Does Red Robin Mean?

Other Meanings of Red Robin

Origins of Red Robin

Fake Etymology, Real History

The Many Saint Valentines

The Roman Priest Who Secretly Performed Marriages

The Bishop of Terni Who Converted His Captor and Healed the Blind

Beekeeping

So Why Do We Celebrate Valentine’s Day?