Uncommon Commentary #100!

The bastardizing of 25 December into a generic "Holiday" is lamentably familiar to us, but we probably don't think much about the fact that a like fate seems to have befallen 14 February.  St. Valentine's Day (the feast day of, as I've heard, a man whom the pagans executed for performing weddings at a time when Roman soldiers were not permitted to marry) has degenerated into simply "Valentine's Day" (a secular celebration of love, and often also of what's euphemistically called lovemaking.)