Be My Valentine

Candy Sweethearts

Loretta reports:

Many centuries ago, when I was in elementary school, we exchanged Valentine’s Day cards in the classroom. We made them, too, but most of the exchanges involved cards that came in  packages of 25 or 100. We traded candy hearts, too.

The sending of cards, notes, and other tokens of friendship or affection goes back centuries. For today, I offer a few historical links.

The New and Complete Valentine Writer for the Year 1805 provides a variety of Valentine’s poetry, rather different sentiments from what we exchanged in school. (The image above left is typical of ours.)

And here and here you’ll find some history about commercial Valentine’s Day cards, much more elegant than those we traded. You can see larger samples of the Whitney cards here.

Images: To My Valentine, 1890, courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 

Clicking on the image will enlarge it.  Clicking on the caption will take you to the source, where you can learn more and enlarge images as needed.