Difference between Valentine's Day and Wedding Anniversary
Valentine's Day is a celebration held each year on the 14th of February, in which love between two people is recognized and celebrated. Traditionally people express their love for one another by means of flowers, candies, and assorted gifts. Greeting cards known as "valentines" are routinely passed to one another.
Wedding anniversaries are celebrations that occur each year on the date of a wedding. Marking each year of the couples married life, wedding anniversaries are often private events where the couple may share a dinner and exchange gifts. Wedding anniversaries of significance are the 10th, 25th, and 50th year of wedded bliss.
Official Recognition of Valentine's Day and Wedding Anniversary
Valentine's Day was not a day that was associated with romantic love until the High Middle Ages, when the romantic poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer was wildly popular. Since the 19th century, Valentine's Day has been celebrated on February 14, even though May 2 is the saint's day according to the liturgical calendar.
In the United States, any married couple celebrating a wedding anniversary of 50 or more years is entitled to receive presidential recognition. In the UK, a monarch will send a message to couple celebrating their 60th wedding anniversary and every five years after. Each wedding anniversary is meant to recall times of happiness, when the marriage was brand new.
History of Valentine's Day and Wedding Anniversary
Established in 496 AD by Pope Gelasius I as recognition of one or more Christian religious martyrs, Valentine's Day was removed from the Roman calendar of saints by Pope Paul VI in 1969. The romantic celebration of love on St. Valentine's Day was started with a poem Chaucer wrote about King Richard II's first anniversary of engagement to Anne of Bohemia.
The couple and their friends and family have long celebrated wedding anniversaries privately, but it was not until the 1930s that wedding anniversaries were held to a tradition of specific types of gifts and celebrations. At first only milestone anniversaries of the first, 10th, 20th, and so on were marked with suggested gifts.
Traditional Gifts and Celebration of Valentine's Day and Wedding Anniversary
Valentine's Day gifts have long been traditionally a hand-made greeting card that includes poetry, but mass-produced Valentine's Day greeting cards have become accepted. Chocolates and flowers are also customary gifts, and many couples become engaged or even married on Valentine's Day. Some countries ban the sale of Valentine products, with religious police making shopkeepers remove all items that are red.
Wedding Anniversary gifts are varied by country, but traditional and modern lists of gifts are available at most gift shops. For instance, in the U.S. and the U.K., paper and cotton were traditional first anniversary gifts, but in the U.S., the modern first anniversary present is clocks.
Summary
St. Valentine's Day
- St. Valentine's Day might be originally a day marked for the observance of martyred saints, but has been a day for love and for lovers since the days of Chaucer.
- A celebration of love in most parts of the world, Valentine's Day is universally associated with personalized greetings of love, known as valentines.
- Rules for gift giving can be loosely translated and kids and adults alike may participate in gift giving.
Wedding Anniversaries
- Wedding Anniversaries are special dates that occur each year to commemorate the date of a marriage.
- While often the first anniversary gift of paper might seem banal to many, creative people can turn this choice of present into something fantastic by means of tickets to a favorite event, a professional photograph, or even a magazine subscription.
- Normally the married couple give gifts to each other but some children or other family members may like to participate in the event and they may also give gifts to the married couple
