Happy Valentines (A day late)

One of the weird things about living outside the US is that the holidays generally fall on different days of the year. Christmas, New Years and Mother's Day are the same. The rest aren't even close. Father's Day in the US is in June while Brazil celebrates it in August. I have tried to turn that into two presents a year but so far it hasn't worked.


The first year or so living here we tried to remember and celebrate all of them. We've since given up on that, other than Thanksgiving, and just go with the Brazilian holidays. Valentines Day was one of the casualties. Yesterday I remembered but we didn't do anything special except go to the beach.

Most Brazilians have never heard of St. Valentine. The patron saint for lovers here is St. Anthony.

Saint Anthony is known as "the marriage saint". Someone who is constantly trying to match make others is known as a "Saint Anthony".

His feast day is a day later on the 13th of June. In the past women would buy statues of St. Anthony and bury him in the ground upside down. They would then pray to St. Anthony and say they would only turn him rightside up if he sends them a good husband. Sounds like extorsion to me.

I asked my wife about it and she said this still goes on, though I've never seen anyone do it. I bet there must be about a million of these buried around the country. I you had some way of finding them, you could dig 'em up, resell them and make a buck or two.

I really wonder about this. Seems like an awful lot of work to me. There's a many a Dickson County girl that found a husband using nothing more than a tubetop, some cheap perfume and a fifth of Mad Dog. Sounds a whole lot easier and much more effective to me.