Saint Valentine’s Day, also called Valentine’s Day or the Feast of Saint Valentine, is an annual celebration of love on February 14. Although, Valentine’s day is not a public holiday in Ghana, it is a major consumer holiday. The idea of Valentine’s day becoming a day of romance came as a result of the believe that February 14 is the beginning of bird’s mating season in France and England during the middle ages.
While some believe that Valentine’s Day is celebrated in the middle of February to commemorate the anniversary of Valentine’s death which occurred around A.D. 270, others claim that the Christian church may have decided to place St. Valentine’s feast day in the middle of February in an effort to “Christianize” the pagan celebration of Lupercalia-a festival dedicated to Faunus, the Roman god of agriculture.
According to History.com, Lupercalia-the ritual festivity survived the initial rise of Christianity but was outlawed as it was deemed “un-Christian” at the end of the 5th century, when Pope Gelasius declared February 14 St. Valentine’s Day. It was not until much later, however, that the day became definitively associated with love.
By the middle of the 18th, it was common for friends and lovers of all social status to exchange small tokens of affection. By 1900, printed cards began to replace written letters due to improvements in printing technology. This graduated to the modernized way of exchanging candies, flowers and gifts between loved ones.
Currently, the oldest known valentine in existence today is a poem written in 1415 by Charles, Duke of Orleans, to his wife while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London following his capture at the Battle of Agincourt. It later became easier for ready-made cards to be used as a way for people to express their emotions in a time when direct expression of one’s feelings was discouraged.
Today, according to the Greeting Card Association, an estimated 1 billion Valentine’s Day cards are sent each year, making Valentine’s Day the second largest card-sending season of the year aside Christmas. Online shops such as Jumia Ghana has seized the opportunity to make the valentine season a memorable one for its customers by partnering with MTN Ghana in their upcoming MTNJumiaLovesYou campaign scheduled for February 5th to February 14th, 2018.
In a bid to pamper customers of their cherished brands, MTN & Jumia are dashing out MTN modems with free data for 6 months, free phones with credits and modems with 1 GB data to first 15 people who would buy items worth Ghs 500 and above on Jumia. Also, Jumia is giving up to 70% discount on all items on its site.
