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Today Valentine’s Day comes with roses, chocolates, and beautiful heart-shaped cards. However, it started as a pagan fertility festival, celebrated from February 13th to February 15th. The feast was in honour of Lupercus – an ancient god who protected people from wolves. At the beginning of the celebration, the men would sacrifice a goat and a dog. The young women would get in line and wait for the men to hit them with the skins of those animals because they believed it would make them fertile. It's hard to go from whipping women to canonizing saints, but Valentine’s Day did it. Legend has it that Valentine was a priest who served during the third century in Rome. When Emperor Claudius II decided that single men made better soldiers than those with wives and families, he outlawed marriage for young men. Valentine, realizing the injustice of the decree, continued to perform marriages for young lovers in secret. When his actions were discovered, Claudius ordered his death, on February 14th. Later the Catholic Church honoured Valentine as martyr and named February 14th “St. Valentine’s Day”. Then in the fifth century, in an effort to get rid of the heathen tradition, Pope Gelasius I decided to combine St. Valentine’s Day with the popular pagan festival by turning the feast into a Christian celebration of fertility and love. During the Victorian era, February 14th was also a day on which unlucky victims could receive “vinegar valentines” from secret haters. These cards featured an illustration and a short line or poem that, instead of offering messages of love and affection, insulted the recipient. They were used as an anonymous medium for saying nasty things that its senders would not dare say to someone’s face. And many of them were written as though these negative thoughts were popular opinion. This concept may sound familiar today and some even call them an early form of “trolling”. We see on Twitter and on other social media platforms what happens when people are allowed to say what they like without fear of retribution. Anonymous forms of communication do facilitate this kind of behaviour. They don’t create it, but they offer opportunities.