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Conversation Hearts
Conversation hearts trace back to 1866, when Boston pharmacist Oliver Chase's candy company — the New England Confectionery Company, or NECCO — adapted a candy-stamping machine originally built for medicinal lozenges to press short printed phrases directly onto small candy tablets, creating one of the earliest examples of mass-produced novelty candy with text printed on it. The heart shape and the format's specific Valentine's Day association arrived in 1902, when Daniel Chase, Oliver's brother, introduced the small pastel candy hearts stamped with short romantic and playful phrases like "BE MINE" and "KISS ME" that became the format's enduring signature. NECCO manufactured the candy continuously from its Massachusetts factories for well over a century before the company went bankrupt and closed in 2018, a shutdown that briefly threatened the future of the candy entirely before Ohio-based Spangler Candy Company purchased the Sweethearts brand and resumed production in time for the following Valentine's Day. Its combination of one of the earliest mass-produced printed-message candies in American history and a genuine brand survival story after its original manufacturer's collapse has made conversation hearts one of the most nostalgic and distinctly old-fashioned Valentine's Day gifts still produced today.
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Greeting Cards
Valentine's Day greeting cards trace back to handmade paper valentines exchanged in England and colonial America well before mass production existed, but the holiday's modern card-giving tradition owes its scale substantially to Hallmark, founded in Kansas City in 1910, which became the dominant force in commercially printed greeting cards across the 20th century. The Greeting Card Association estimates that roughly 145 million Valentine's Day cards are exchanged in the United States each year, excluding the additional cards children exchange in school classroom valentine parties — a scale that makes Valentine's Day the second-largest card-sending occasion of the year in the US, behind only Christmas. That classroom-exchange tradition, in which schoolchildren give small valentines to every classmate rather than a single romantic recipient, has broadened the holiday's card-giving custom well beyond romantic couples alone, embedding it into American childhood as a shared classroom ritual rather than purely an adult romantic gesture. Its combination of centuries-old handmade paper valentine traditions and a modern mass-production greeting card industry anchored by companies like Hallmark has made the greeting card one of the most universally exchanged Valentine's Day gifts across every age group in the country.
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