Valentine's Day

🇮🇳How does India mark Valentine's Day?Valentine Week

India stretches Valentine's into a full week, from 7 to 14 February, with each day given its own name — rose day, chocolate day and so on — and Valentine's Day itself at the end. This 'Valentine Week' was formed over recent decades by commerce and media rather than being a traditional festival; it is prominent in cities and among younger people, and not necessarily taken up elsewhere or across generations.Setting it against India's national holiday list makes the position clearer: that list runs to seventeen entries including Republic Day, Independence Day, Gandhi's birthday, Diwali, Id-ul-Fitr and Christmas, and Valentine's is not on it, nor is any day in February assigned to it. Valentine Week exists entirely outside the national calendar.

dfe.gov.in ↗

🇨🇳How does China mark Valentine's Day?情人节（2月14日）

The fourteenth of February carries no official standing in China — neither list in the Measures on National Holidays and Commemorative Days contains it. What the state does recognise is the other one: Qixi. In 2006 the State Council published the first national list of intangible cultural heritage (State Council Document No. 18 of 2006, 518 items), and the Qixi festival appears as item IX-4. So in one society the day with the loudest commercial voice has no institutional identity, while the day the institutions do acknowledge is registered as heritage in need of protection — and being protected means it was judged to be slipping away.

gov.cn ↗gov.cn ↗

🇮🇩How does Indonesia mark Valentine's Day?Hari Valentine

The fourteenth of February is not a holiday in Indonesia, and the institutional trace it leaves runs the other way: around the date each year, education offices in a number of local governments issue circulars — surat edaran — asking schools in their area to discourage students from marking it. Depok in West Java issued one in 2023, Pasuruan Regency in East Java in 2017, and the Riau Islands provincial education office advised its senior and vocational secondary schools likewise. The stated reason is plain: it does not fit religious, social and cultural norms. Among the seven places on this page, Indonesia is the only one where the official paperwork mentions the day in order to tell people not to observe it.

berita.depok.go.id ↗kepriprov.go.id ↗

🇯🇵How does Japan mark Valentine's Day? · バレンタインデー

In Japan, 14 February is when women give chocolate to men. According to the Statistics Bureau, the practice is said to have begun around 1958 and settled into custom through the late 1960s and 1970s. The trace it leaves is measurable: the household survey shows February chocolate spending at 2.8 times the monthly average for the year, at 1,376 yen in the February concerned. The split between honmei and giri chocolate turns gift-giving into a classification of relationships, though obligatory workplace chocolate has been visibly receding.

stat.go.jp ↗japan.travel ↗

🇹🇼How does Taiwan mark Valentine's Day?西洋情人節

Taiwan's 14 February is not a holiday, and in law it does not even have a name. The Act on Commemorative Days and Holidays is otherwise generous with names: Article 3 enumerates twenty commemorative days, and Article 5 runs to twenty-eight clauses of festivals, among them Mother's Day (the second Sunday in May), Father's Day (8 August) and Grandparents' Day (the fourth Sunday in August) — three days about family relationships. Only the six commemorative days singled out in Article 4 and a short list in Article 6 actually carry a day off, so 'named but worked' is the normal condition in Taiwan. Valentine's Day is not even named. The one point where the date touches the state is household registration: because it is not a festival, whether you can register a marriage on it depends entirely on which weekday it falls. Taiwan's answer is weekend appointment registration — booked at least three working days before the registration date, with the effective date of the marriage expressly 'not limited to the working days set by the personnel administration' — although Taichung's offices have suspended weekend bookings during long holiday runs since February 2023. In 2026 the arrangement reaches its limit: the government working calendar approved by the Directorate-General of Personnel Administration puts the Lunar New Year break at Saturday 14 February through Sunday 22 February, nine days, and Valentine's Day is day one of it. What gives Taiwan that day off is not Valentine's Day; it is the Lunar New Year.

law.moj.gov.tw ↗dgpa.gov.tw ↗

🇺🇸How does United States mark Valentine's Day? · Valentine's Day

Valentine's Day in the United States is 14 February, a single day, not a holiday, and with no return-gift day. There is no rule about which direction gifts flow; cards, flowers, chocolate and going out to eat are the usual combination, while in schools it is common for a whole class to exchange cards — expanding it from a couples' day into a classroom activity. Commercially it is large; institutionally it does not exist at all.The Census Bureau's page ties the day to population data: by the 2022 American Community Survey, 49.8 per cent of men and 46.3 per cent of women aged fifteen and over were married, and 75.5 per cent of those who have ever married had made only one trip down the aisle. Talking about Valentine's Day through census figures is a characteristically American way of attaching a holiday to statistics.

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census.gov ↗

🇯🇵How does Japan mark Valentine's Day? · ホワイトデー

White Day on 14 March is Japan's return-gift day: whoever received in February gives back a month later. That rule of obligatory reciprocity is unique among the seven places here — it converts a one-way gift into a paired obligation, and even fixes the interval. What to give back, and whether it should cost more than the original, once had all sorts of rules attached; in recent years that too is treated as an individual choice.

stat.go.jp ↗japan.travel ↗

🇧🇷How does Brazil mark Valentine's Day?Dia dos Namorados

Brazil's day for couples is 12 June, not 14 February. The date sits the day before the feast of Saint Anthony on 13 June — in Brazil, the saint associated with matchmaking. So the Brazilian Valentine's follows the religious calendar rather than the northern-hemisphere February. It also falls inside the June festival month, so the whole of June is busy.

justica.pr.gov.br ↗