Time until Valentine's Day

Valentine's Day is 14 February, a saint's feast day that picked up its romantic meaning in the late medieval period and its card industry in the nineteenth century. The countdown marks the calendar date, not a guaranteed day off; check your local calendar before making plans. Restaurants and florists treat it as one of the busiest dates of the year, which is the practical argument for watching this countdown a couple of weeks out rather than on the day.

The bookable parts of the day go first. Restaurant tables for the evening of the 14th are commonly gone two or three weeks ahead in cities, florists work to a delivery schedule set in January, and cut flower prices rise sharply in the run-up because the demand is concentrated into a single day. Posted cards need a few days in hand, and more for international post. Observance is very uneven: it is a large commercial occasion in the United States, Britain and Japan, barely marked in some countries, and in Japan and South Korea convention splits the giving between 14 February and 14 March. Nothing closes for it, so a Valentine's Day in the middle of the working week leaves the evening to carry the whole occasion.

Finland and Estonia keep 14 February as a day of friendship rather than romance, with cards going to friends as readily as to partners. Wales has a date of its own on 25 January for Saint Dwynwen, marked alongside the February one rather than instead of it. Brazil skips February altogether and holds Dia dos Namorados on 12 June, the eve of Saint Anthony's day. The error is assuming the date is universal, so that a card posted across a border will land while it still means something: in several countries the equivalent occasion sits four months away and the February date passes without comment.

The next one falls on Sunday, 14 February 2027, and this page counts down to the midnight that starts it in whatever time zone your browser reports.

Handwritten valentines survive from the fifteenth century, the earliest in English written by Margery Brews to John Paston in 1477. Printed ones were on sale in London by the 1820s, and Britain's Penny Post of 1840 put a card within reach of almost anyone, after which the volume rose fast enough to worry the post office. Esther Howland began making lace-and-paper valentines commercially in Massachusetts in the late 1840s and built a substantial business out of it.

Japan received the day through a confectioner's campaign in the 1950s and turned it into something with rules of its own. Women give chocolate, with the obligatory giri-choco for colleagues kept carefully distinct from the kind meant seriously, and men reciprocate a month later on White Day, 14 March. South Korea took both and added a third on 14 April, when anyone who received nothing on either is supposed to eat black noodles. Attempts to export White Day to other countries have gone nowhere.