The STRANGE & FREAKY history of Valentine's Day!

Rawr.

Happy Valentine's Day.

Yeah, okay.

This will make sense to you.

My name's Ronnie, I'm a lion, and I'm here to teach you about Valentine's Day,

the day of love.

The day where, ladies, you get really upset because you think your boyfriend or your husband

doesn't like you because he didn't buy you something really expensive like a ring, or

he didn't buy you what you wanted, but you never told him what you wanted, and then you

don't talk to him and then you get into a fight.

Happy Valentine's Day.

That doesn't make sense, just like me wearing a lion costume.

I'm going to explain to you guys the history of Valentine's Day.

I will never understand why people get so upset on Valentine's Day, because guess what?

If a guy likes you it's not about buying you gifts, it's about being with you and spending

time with you.

Ladies, give your guys a break. Yeah?

Enjoy their company, have a nice dinner, go out and kill people or something.

Celebrate Valentine's Day.

Go and get whipped with blood or something in animal skins, okay?

Because that's how we really celebrate Valentine's Day.

So, guys, if you've got a girlfriend that gets angry because you don't buy her the right thing,

good luck with that.

Maybe you could be executed and that would be better.

Maybe Valentine's Day is about being executed.

Maybe that makes it easier and better.

Let's go into the history of Valentine's Day.

So, Valentine's Day, wow.

When I researched this, what a lot of crazy stories.

Meow.

Don't understand.

We're going to start with this, though.

I can tell you when it is.

Every day...

Every year it's the same day, it's February the 14th.

Okay?

So if you're watching this and you haven't gotten your girlfriend a gift, get out,

go get one.

Ladies, do you buy your boyfriend a gift on Valentine's Day?

Double standard, okay?

So you get upset because the guy didn't buy you a good gift, but what'd you buy him?

Do men get upset and start to cry, and: "Oh, I didn't get a good gift."

Yeah, guys probably do.

Oh, guys.

So, anyways, Valentine's Day, go.

Valentine's Day as we know it now, I guess, is to honour a Catholic saint.

But the thing was there wasn't just one, there were many Catholic saints and their names

were Valentine.

Maybe your name's Valentine, Valentina.

So, the day as we know is to honour Catholic saints named Valentine.

So there was a really, really special guy and his name was Saint Valentine-see, I told you

-and he was executed.

Mm-hmm, yeah, he was killed in the year 270.

By my lion brain that's a long time ago.

The reason why he was killed is he would perform marriages or he would marry couples.

Hmm.

So, Valentine's Day this guy would marry people and then they killed him.

Well, this is so romantic.

The reason why he was executed is because the Emperor or the guy in charge named Claudius II

had apparently strict anti-marriage laws.

Okay, now, I didn't live back then.

I don't know if any of this is true, but this is what I found.

So, apparently he, Claudius II wanted his soldiers to not be married so they could concentrate

on killing people, as we do.

So he reckons that if they got married they wouldn't want to die for him and save their

country, so he didn't like the idea of love and people getting married, so in the year

270, apparently on February 14th

-they have documents of this-they executed this Saint Valentine.

So Valentine's Day is about execution.

Done. Okay.

Now, when I was researching: Why February the 14th?

So, if we go back before this, the ancient Romans, they celebrated what's called the

Feast of Lupercalia.

Okay?

This was on the 15th of February.

We've missed a day, there.

This was a fertility festival.

A fertility festival means that in the springtime most things-humans, plants, animals-are ready

to reproduce and have children.

So, a fertility festival, basically they want people to have sex and have babies.

That's Valentine's Day.

Good.

So, what they did...

[Laughs] This is cool.

So these two guys were hanging out in a cave.

They have names.

Their names were both starting with "R", and basically their names were Romulus and Remus.

Okay?

They're hanging out in a cave with their mother or with a woman, and this woman was actually

a she-wolf, Lupa.

So, there's two guys, Romulus and Remus, they're hanging out in a cave with a woman who's a wolf.

This is cool.

So, what they did is they would sacrifice...

So, sacrifice is actually like this.

Ronnie makes a spelling mistake again.

They would sacrifice a goat.

Maaa.

Okay?

So, this is so romantic.

They would dip the goat skin in blood, so they would kill the goat, rip off his skin,

dip it in the blood, and they would run around the town and they would hit people, men and

women, with the blood.

They did this also to their crops.

"Crops" means plants.

So they'd take the goat's blood and the goat skin and come over, and give you a little

whack, for some...

Gets probably some goat blood on you, and then they'd hit the crops - fertility so that

it grows. Right?

So you'd come along, go:

"Oh, yeah, you're going to have babies now. Look at all the corn."

Okay, cool.

So, this is where it comes from.

So I guess if you got hit with some goat blood that that would mean that that's awesome and

then you could have a baby.

Cool.

Another thing that they would do during this festival is they would put their names in

an urn.

An urn is like a big container.

Fancy container.

And bachelors...

Now, "bachelors" means unmarried men would choose a name.

"God, please don't make it... Oh, it's that one."

So, the name that they got, I guess they would go on a date or, I don't know, hit each other

with some goat blood or something.

I don't know what they did.

And then they might get married and have goat-blood children. Cool.

What happened was at this time Romans were pagan, and then as we know in history-still

happening today now-if you have a different religion from someone else, that's not cool

so you have to change everything and kill people.

So the Christians came in, they killed the pagans, and they go:

"Do you know what? We're going to change this day to the 14th of February.

We're going to call it the feast..."

So "the feast" means a big meal where everybody eats together.

So, the Christians came in and they changed it to Saint Valentine's Day Feast

around the same day.

I don't know if they sacrificed goats.

Probably not as fun.

They probably just ate some food.

But when you look back at the history of this whole idea of giving flowers, or candies,

or gifts to people-hmm, lion's confused-it happened with a really, really, really cool

author (it's the only book I've ever read that I liked) Geoffrey Chaucer.

He wrote a book called The Canterbury Tales.

If you're interested in crazy books about-hmm-sex and violence, read this guy, Geoffrey Chaucer.

So in the 14th century he would write about lovers, how they would give each other gifts.

And then in the 18th century people actually started to exchange flowers, and gifts, and candy,

and cards to people.

So I guess that's how we got into this.

I don't know, I kind of like the goat sacrifice thing better.

I think that's cooler.

Hey, now I have given you an idea of what to do for Valentine's Day.

Okay? If you're like:

"I don't know what to do', grab a goat, sacrifice it, whip people with blood. That's a Valentine's Day."

There's another really, really famous Valentine's Day story close to my heart, it happened in

1929 in a place called Lincoln Park in Chicago.

Not the band Linkin Park, they're terrible.

God.

But Lincoln Park is actually a place in Chicago.

So what happened on Valentine's Day in the morning is seven men were just shot.

They were all lined up, and it's called the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre.

"Massacre" means many people die.

So what happened is in Chicago during this time there were two warring mafia gangs, one

was the Irish mafia and the other one was the very famous Al Capone.

Al Capone's guns don't argue!

So, Al Capone set up this really cool massacre on Saint Valentine's Day where he killed seven

of the Irish mobsters.

He apparently lined them up against the wall, had numerous machine guns and killed them.

Happy Valentine's Day.

Go sacrifice a goat, kill some mobsters, you know, do what you do.

Just don't complain.

Rawr.