Valentine's Day (All Lovers' Day)

Happy Lovers' Day!In America, Valentine’s Day was celebrated later than in Europe, since 1777.

At the beginning of the last century, Americans began to send marzipans to their brides on Valentine's Day. But marzipan contained sugar, which was very expensive. The true scope of this tradition acquired after in 1800 began to widely use sugar beet.

Americans urgently established on the continent the production of caramel and began to scratch on candy corresponding to the holiday words. Caramel was made red and white. Red means passion, and white means purity of love. In the 50s, sweets began to be laid in cardboard boxes in the shape of a heart.

Americans wouldn’t be Americans if they hadn’t made their own adjustments. A week before the holiday, schoolchildren cut out hearts from papier-mache, paint and make various inscriptions. These hearts give to lonely, unhappy and sick people.

Wal-Mart, the largest chain of stores, surveyed gift buyers and found that men buy gifts for Valentine’s Day 62% more often than women. Reuters reported that in 65% of cases, lovers supply the right cheek for kissing.

Lovers’ Day always evokes pleasant associations, but in the United States, 2005 was marked by an extremely tragic criminal case. After the events of the Day of Lovers, the court heard the case of attempted mass suicide of 31 women.

The organizer of the suicide was a 26-year-old resident of the city of Clamat Hill (Oregon) Gerald Crane. It turned out that he used the Internet to search for depressed and emotionally unstable women to make a “contract” with them for mass suicide on Valentine’s Day.