Superstitions and Valentines

Those of you reading the newspaper today probably do not suffer from paraskavedekatriaphobia. If you did you’d probably be hiding under the bed because today is Friday the 13th. That twenty-three letter word is an amalgamation of the Greek words Paraskevi meaning Friday, dekatreis meaning 13, and phobia meaning fear. Those of you still reading do not suffer from hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia, the fear of long words. No, I did not make up that word, but I really wish I had.
Why would Friday the 13th be considered unlucky? Thursday the 27th may be pretty crummy but nobody talks about it. The number thirteen has long been considered unlucky. One explanation I found for this is because the number twelve is often considered a good number. Numerologists consider twelve to represent completeness. This is because there are twelve months in a year, twelve hours on the clock, twelve inches in a foot, twelve tribes of Israel, twelve apostles of Jesus, twelve gods of Olympus, twelve drummers drumming and twelve ladybugs at the ladybug picnic (I loved that song on Sesame Street). Because twelve is complete, meaning it is well-centered with a firm grasp of its own self-worth, thirteen is horribly jealous and therefore goes around trying to screw things up.
Friday also has a spotty past. In Norse mythology Friday is named after Frigga, that wild and crazy goddess of love and fertility. Well, when the Norse tribes converted to Christianity Frigga was banished to some fjord or something in the frigid north and was none too happy about it. So, every Friday she and a bunch of her closest friends, witches and a guy called the devil, would get together, throw back a few drinks and plan all the crummy stuff they would pull on people over the next week.
I guess this all means today is unlucky because an indignant number and a ticked off love goddess haven’t taken a twelve step program to outgrow their pettiness. Maybe if we made it a thirteen step program they’d be interested.
If we all survive today tomorrow brings a whole new set of issues our way. It’s St. Valentine’s Day. Why we connect February the 14th with romantic love is as convoluted as why we connect Friday the 13th with Ziggy-type ill-fortune and guy wearing a hockey mask.
Hours and hours of exhaustive research, well, okay, three and a half minutes on Wikipedia, showed me the Saint Valentine whose feast was on February 14th has a biography even shorter than the attention span of a ten year old watching Timothy Geithner explain how the Federal Reserve changing the prime interest rate can cause shockwaves in the Nikkei average….zzzzzzz. Sorry, it isn’t just ten year olds who find that stuff anesthetic.
Back on track. Valentine of Rome was a priest in, you guessed it, Rome, who suffered martyrdom in 269 was buried on the Via Flaminia and whose relics are at the Church of Saint Praxed in, there is a theme developing here, Rome. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable if my relics were on display for just anyone to see.
The earliest surviving valentine is a fifteenth-century rondeau, that’s a poem for the non-romantics out there, written by Charles, Duke of Orleans, to his wife. This was along the lines of a Casey Kasem long distance dedication because Chuck was sitting in the Tower of London after coming out on the wrong side of the Battle of Agincourt.
Since that time Valentine’s Day has been taken from romance to commerce. There is an arc of commercials being presented by a chain of jewelry stores which describes a guy who is so in touch with his inner romantic he hand crafts a card with special paper, curlicue lettering on the front, sealing wax on the back and a poem he wrote himself because he couldn’t find a card to express the depth of his emotion. The commercial goes on to say since every other guy is incapable of that we need to get our sorry behinds to Helzberg’s and drop a chunk of last month’s paycheck in order to buy the affection of the lady in our lives. Neither choice is very attractive to me.
A friend of mine had the right idea. He wasn’t a Shakespearian romantic nor was he a diamond purchasing Casanova. He would take his wife to the store, guide her to the rack of cards and show her the one he would have bought for her if he had been inclined to spend any money on such frivolity.