Valentine's Day Celebration

By Miss Sangita Dhanmeher

February 14 is celebrated as Valentine's Day. It is also called as St. Valentine's Day. Lovers express their affection with flowers, greeting cards and other romantic gifts on this day. On this day, people send greeting cards called valentines to their sweethearts, friends, and members of their families.

The day is popular in the United States as well as in Britain, Canada, and Australia, and it is also celebrated in other countries, including France and Mexico. It has expanded to expressions of affection among relatives and friends. Many schoolchildren exchange valentines with one another on this day. Youngsters like this day because this is the only day being celebrated in the name of love and romance.

In fact there were several Christian martyrs named Valentine, but the day probably took its name from a priest who was martyred about AD 270 by the emperor Claudius II Gothicus. According to legend, the priest signed a letter to his jailer's daughter, whom he had befriended and with whom he had fallen in love, "from your Valentine."

The holiday also had origins in the Roman festival of Lupercalia, held in mid-February. The festival, which celebrated the coming of spring, included fertility rites and the pairing off of women with men by lottery. It is well known that at the end of the 5th century, Pope Gelasius I replaced Lupercalia with St. Valentine's Day. Then it came to be celebrated as a day of romance from about the 14th century.

Formal messages, or valentines, appeared in the 1500s, and by the late 1700s commercially printed cards were being used. The first commercial valentines in the United States were printed in the mid-1800s. Valentines commonly depict Cupid, the Roman god of love, along with hearts, traditionally the seat of emotion. Because it was thought that their mating season began in mid-February, birds also became a symbol of the day. Traditional gifts include candy and flowers, particularly red roses, a symbol of beauty and love.

It is the right time to strengthen your relationship with your partner. Nowadays this particular day has been very much commercialized. The market is ready to offer almost everything as a Valentine's Day gift by just attaching a pink colored heart symbol on it as the heart symbol is very much associated with love.

There are many ways to celebrate this day. But whatever you plan for this day, do it from the heart. Whether you make a simple handmade greeting card (or any other craft) or you purchase a simple gift from the market, please do not forget to pack it nicely with sincere feelings for your beloved! Then only your presentation of the gift for Valentine's Day will be superb. When you pack it with or fill it with your sincere feelings then automatically you have used your creative ideas, efforts to personalize the gift. Naturally this will make your Valentine's Day a special and memorable one.

Please visit to http://www.creativeartofgreetingscards.com/ to have a look at the rich collection of hand painted greeting cards, handcrafted greeting cards for various occasions like Valentine's day cards, Flower cards etc. These are made out of premium quality handmade paper from India.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Sangeeta_Dhanmeher

Greeting Card and its Importance

By Sangeeta Dhanmeher

A Greeting card is just a small piece of paper printed or hand painted or handcrafted with printed or handwritten message to convey your feelings to someone. Nowadays there are so many ways we can express ourselves, our feelings to someone such as a SMS, an email massage, an ecard, a fax message or just a telephone/cell phone. But still Greeting Cards are being used for this purpose. Some people think to such an extent that why to spend money and time in purchasing and sending a greeting card, instead why not send a SMS, so cheap and time saving option!!!

Nowadays what matters in every field is the presentation. Greetings card is also one of the means of presenting your feelings. I would say that the Greetings card is an esthetic looking packing of your feelings/expressions so that the recipient feels delighted and honoured.

Hence Greeting cards can be used for almost all occasions, only thing that you should select the right card, appropriate color, design or picture along with the printed message or your own handwritten massage, which will reveal your affection. As Greeting cards are for many reasons, occasions and hence there are many types of Greeting Cards available in the market:

Birthday card
New year card
Anniversary card
Thank you card
Thinking of you card
Sorry card
Best wishes card
Good Luck card
Get well card
Flower card
Congratulations card
Engagement card
New baby card
I Love you card
Valentines day card
Christmas card
Dipavali card
Diwali card
Navratri card
Ugadi card (Hindu New Year card)
Gudhipadawa card (Hindu New Year card)
Sankranti card
Mothers day card
Fathers day card
Congratulation card and so on.

Hallmark Cards and American Greetings are the largest producers of greeting cards in the world. In the United Kingdom, it is estimated that one billion pounds are spent on greeting cards every year, with the average person sending 55 cards per year.

In the United States, many adults traditionally mail Christmas cards to their friends and relatives in December. Many service businesses also send cards to their customers in this season, usually with a universally acceptable non-religious message such as "happy holidays" or "seasons's greetings.

The Historians say the custom of sending greeting cards is started by to the ancient Chinese who exchanged messages of good will to celebrate the New Year. Egyptians in ancient times conveyed their greetings on papyrus scrolls. By the early 1400s, handmade paper greeting cards were being exchanged in Europe. The Germans are known to have printed New Year's greetings from woodcuts as early as 1400, and handmade paper Valentines were being exchanged in various parts of Europe in the early to mid-1400s.

By the 1850s, the greeting card had been transformed from a relatively expensive, handmade and hand-delivered gift to a popular and affordable means of personal communication. Thanks to new advances in printing and mechanization. This was followed by new trends like Christmas cards, the first of which appeared in published form in London in 1843 when Sir Henry Cole hired artist John Calcott Horsley to design a holiday card that he could send to his friends and acquaintances. In the 1860s, companies like Marcus Ward & Co, Goodall and Charles Bennett began the mass production of greeting cards. They employed well-known artists such as Kate Greenaway and Walter Crane as illustrators and card designers.

There are two major categories of greeting cards, one is mass produced ( printed on offset printing machines etc.) and other is handmade greeting cards. Hand painted greeting cards is also a separate category of greeting cards. These cards are also available but this type of cards can not be mass- produced as each card has to be individually painted. So every hand painted card is unique.

Please visit to http://www.creativeartofgreetingscards.com/ to have a look at the rich collection of hand painted greeting cards, handcrafted greeting cards for various occasions. These are made out of premium quality handmade paper from India.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Sangeeta_Dhanmeher