Valentine's Day Statistics

Valentine's Day, the season of love, romance, and more love. For many, Valentine's Day is a mad rush act of booking the perfect restaurant, ordering the perfect arrangement of jaunty roses, and wrapping that perfect, extravagant Valentine gift. While for some, the season of hearts passes by quietly, unceremoniously, just like any other day.

Valentine's Day has often been criticized as just an excuse for consumerism, an opportunity for businesses. Consequently, cynics everywhere have also unfairly stained the well-meaning tradition of sending Valentine cards. As if it is Hallmark's fault that people are only sending cards perfunctorily, without thought at all, but just to get over the holiday. Indeed, Valentine's Day is the second largest card-exchanging holiday next to Christmas, making Hallmark the unmistakable industry leader.

Other Valentine's Day statistics are:

-85% of all Valentine cards are bought by women.

-73% of flowers are bought by men, and only 27% are by women.

-Chocolate and candy sales reach profits of $1,011 billion during Valentines.

-Approximately one in four Americans do not celebrate the holiday at all. In addition, 15% of American women (and even men) send flowers to themselves on Valentine's Day.

-There is no shortage of places where you can buy flowers for your valentine: there were 26,400 florists nationwide, employing 123,600 persons, in 1995. 

-2005 Valentine's Day Consumer Intentions and Actions Survey,  found the average consumer will spend $97.27 on Valentine's Day, down slightly from $99.24 last year.

-BUT 61.8 percent of consumers plan on celebrating the holiday, which is up from 59.8 percent one year ago.

-In all, 2005 Valentine's Day spending was forecasted to reach $13.19 billion.

Pets at All best Ideas

At All Best Ideas, we provide a variety of the best animal pets. These pets vary into lovebirds, dogs, cats, hamsters, fish, and even snakes. These pets do not harm people, especially when trained. Each pet has a unique character and affects on a human in a special way.

-The dog is a domesticated form of the wolf. The domestic dog has been one of the most widely kept working and companion animals in human history. Amongst canine enthusiasts, the word "dog" may also mean the male of a canine species, as opposed to the word "bitch" for the female of the species. The dog quickly became ubiquitous across culture across the world, and was extremely valuable to early human settlements. For instance, it is believed that the successful emigration across the Bering Strait might not have been possible without sled dogs. Dogs perform many roles for people, such as hunting, herding, protection, assisting police and military, companionship, and, more recently, aiding handicapped individuals. This versatility, more than almost any other known animal, has given them the nickname "Man's best friend" in the western world. Currently, there are estimated to be 400 million dogs in the world.

- The cat also known as the domestic cat or housecat is a small carnivorous mammal that is valued by humans for its companionship and its ability to hunt vermin and household pests. Cats have been associated with humans for at least 9,500 years, and are currently the most popular pet in the world. Due to their close association with humans, cats are now found almost everywhere on Earth. This extreme adaptability and their worrying impacts on native animals have led to them being classed as an invasive species.

- Lovebirds are 13 to 17 centimeters in length and from 40 to 60 grams in weight. They are among the smallest parrots, characterized by a stocky build, a short blunt tail, and a relatively large, sharp beak. Wild type lovebirds are mostly green with a variety of colors on their upper body, depending on the species. The Fischer's Lovebird, Black-cheeked Lovebird, and the Masked Lovebird have a prominent white ring around their eyes. The Abyssinian Lovebird, the Madagascar Lovebird, and the Red-faced Lovebird are sexually dimorphic. Selective breeding of the species that are popular in aviculture has produced many color mutant varieties.

- Hamsters are crepuscular. In the wild, they burrow underground in the daylight to avoid being caught by predators. Their diet contains a variety of foods, including dried food, berries, nuts, fresh fruits and vegetables. In the wild they will eat any wheat, nuts and small bits of fruit and vegetables that they might find lying around on the ground, and will occasionally eat small insects such as small fruit flies, crickets, and meal worms. They have elongated fur-lined pouches on both sides of their heads that extend to their shoulders, which they stuff full of food to be stored, brought back to the colony or to be eaten later.

-The goldfish was one of the earliest fish to be domesticated, and is still one of the most commonly kept aquarium fish. A relatively small member of the carp family, the goldfish is a domesticated version of a dark-gray/olive/brown carp native to East Asia that was introduced to Europe in the late 17th century. The mutation that gave rise to the goldfish is also known from other cyprinid species, such as common carp and tench.

-Snakes are elongate legless carnivorous reptiles of the suborder Serpentes that can be distinguished from legless lizards by their lack of eyelids and external ears. Like all squamates, snakes are ectothermic amniote vertebrates covered in overlapping scales. Many species of snakes have skulls with many more joints than their lizard ancestors, enabling them to swallow prey much larger than their heads with their highly mobile jaws. In order to accommodate their narrow bodies, snakes' paired organs (such as kidneys) appear one in front of the other instead of side by side, and most have only one functional lung.

 Many people have a wide interest in raising pet. Send a Pet to Lebanon, Log on to http://www.allbestideas.com/ and send one of the pets mentioned in the text to lebanon.

The History Of Valentine's Day

On 14 February, all the nations celebrate Saint Valentine’s Day, usually by the way of exchanging cards, sweets, lingerie, flowers,  jewelry, or any type of gift that might express the feeling of love.

What exactly are we celebrating, is it just a holiday the retail stores invented for the increase of profit? This idea is possible; however, it is not true. Valentines is the Christian celebration of Saint Valentines.

We are following a Christian and ancient Roman tradition. By now, the Catholic Church recognizes three Saints by the name of Valentine, or Valentinus.

The first myth concerning the celebration of Valentine’s Day is the following:

During the 3^rd century a priest by the name of Valentine, under Claudius II in Rome, secretly disobeyed the law.

Claudius had come to believe that a single soldier was a better soldier than a married young man was and so decided to outlaw marriage in order to have very young strong men with no wives at his disposal.

Valentine, the priest, did not obey this law and continued to celebrate the holy bond of marriage for young couples in secrecy.

Of course, the way it always works with secret clauses, Claudius caught the priest and decided to execute him.

The second legend states that Valentine was a prisoner who fell in love with a young woman, who came to see him often, and that she was his jailors daughter. Before his execution, he wrote her a love letter, signed with ‘Your Valentine’.

No one is even sure if 14 February was the day of his birth or his death or if it had indeed anything to do with Saint Valentine at all. The only thing that is sure is that the Romans had a tradition in the middle of February, which would mark the 14^th, called the Love Lottery. It was believed that spring and with it, the renewal of life came along in the middle of February, therefore the love lottery was held, coupling young men and women for one year, often leading to marriage.

 The USA, Canada, Mexico, France, Australia and the United Kingdom celebrate Valentine’s Day.

In the British museum, you can view the oldest known Valentine’s card.

Valentine’s Day became an official Catholic Holiday in the year 496 or 498 AD Pope Gelasius declared the 14 February to be Saint Valentine’s Day.

 Since then the symbol of valentines became the color Red, specifically the valentine red heart.

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