Despite the title of this article, I am personally not “all about Valentine’s Day”. Literally billions of people are, however, so let’s see how the holiday came from its beginnings to the commercial juggernaut it is today.

Like many holidays in Western culture, Valentine’s day started out as Catholic feast day in honor of St. Valentine. It was established by Pope Gelasius I on February 14th in 496 C.E., because Saint Valentine of Rome died on that day 227 years prior. There were actually a number of Christian martyrs named Valentine, but the one day serves to represent them all.

By the 1300’s, the feast day in February began to be associated with love because of the mating pairs of birds in the springtime. Today’s circus of chocolates and flowers that we see in the U.S. can actually be blamed on the British. Gifts of candies, flowers and greeting cards were presented to romantic interests in England as early as the late 1700’s. In 1868, the Cadbury company started making Fancy Boxes, filled with chocolate candies and shaped like a heart (the symbol, not the organ in your chest).

By the 20th century, Americans had taken Valentine’s Day celebrating to the extreme. Not only were candies, flowers and cards expected, but jewelry and stuffed toys as well. It is estimated that 190 million Valentine’s greeting cards are sent each year in the U.S. alone. If you include card exchanges that happen in schools every year, that number climbs to over a billion. In 2013, Americans averaged $131 per person spent of Valentine’s Day stuff, which works out to be tens of billions of dollars a year.

The annual attempt to buy love isn’t unique to the U.S. and United Kingdom. Valentine’s Day is celebrated all over the Western Hemisphere, Europe and Australia, India, and Asia – including places like China and Afghanistan. The only place this doesn’t seem to happen is in African countries.

Many people think Valentine’s day is great because of the cultural pressure to present gifts. The way I see it, the real winners of the holiday are the companies that produce candy, greeting cards, jewelry, stuffed bears, and flowers.

If you are one of those people that celebrates February 14th for emotional or religious reasons, awesome. I don’t celebrate it at all.