Box of Chocolates

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• Top 8 Valentine's Day Gifts of All Time

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• Red Roses

  Red roses became linked to romantic love substantially through Victorian-era "language of flowers" traditions, in which specific blooms and colors were understood to carry coded emotional meanings — red roses specifically came to signify deep romantic love and desire, a meaning that's stuck almost unchanged into the modern Valentine's Day tradition. The scale of the modern rose trade around the holiday is genuinely enormous: the vast majority of roses sold in the United States around Valentine's Day are grown in Colombia and Ecuador and flown into the country through Miami International Airport, which handles a dramatic surge in floral cargo shipments in the weeks leading up to February 14th every year. That single-day demand spike is significant enough that the US floral industry treats Valentine's Day as one of its two biggest sales events of the entire year, alongside Mother's Day, with the National Retail Federation consistently reporting billions of dollars in Valentine's Day flower spending annually. Its combination of a centuries-old symbolic association with romantic love and a genuinely massive, logistically significant modern supply chain built specifically around meeting a single day's demand has made red roses the most immediately recognizable Valentine's Day gift of all.

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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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• Jewelry

  Jewelry became a major category of Valentine's Day gift-giving substantially through 20th-century diamond and jewelry industry marketing, most notably De Beers's "A Diamond Is Forever" campaign launched in 1947, which helped cement diamonds and fine jewelry as the ultimate symbol of serious, lasting romantic commitment in American popular culture. Tiffany & Co., founded in New York in 1837, became one of the most recognized names in that broader jewelry-as-romance tradition, its distinctive robin's-egg-blue packaging becoming so closely associated with luxury gift-giving that "Tiffany blue" is now a registered, trademarked color in its own right. The National Retail Federation has consistently reported that jewelry accounts for one of the single largest dollar categories of total Valentine's Day spending each year, even though it's purchased by a smaller share of gift-givers than flowers or candy — a reflection of jewelry's positioning as the higher-stakes, more significant gift within the holiday's broader gift-giving hierarchy. Its combination of a deliberately cultivated 20th-century marketing legacy and its continued status as the highest-dollar-value gift category of the holiday has made jewelry the Valentine's Day gift most closely associated with serious, long-term romantic commitment.

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• Teddy Bears

  The teddy bear traces its name and origin directly to a 1902 hunting trip taken by President Theodore Roosevelt in Mississippi, during which Roosevelt famously refused to shoot a bound, exhausted bear cub his hunting guides had captured for him — an incident widely covered in newspapers and captured in a political cartoon that inspired candy shop owner Morris Michtom to create and sell a stuffed "Teddy's bear" toy shortly afterward. Michtom's toy became successful enough that he and his wife Rose founded the Ideal Novelty and Toy Company in Brooklyn specifically to manufacture teddy bears at scale, helping launch what became a massive and enduring category of the American toy industry that's remained popular for well over a century since. The teddy bear's association with Valentine's Day specifically grew through the mid-to-late 20th century as manufacturers began producing heart-holding and Valentine-themed variants marketed directly at the holiday, positioning the stuffed animal as a gentler, less expensive alternative to jewelry or flowers. Its combination of a genuinely well-documented presidential origin story and a century-long run as one of America's most beloved stuffed toys has made the teddy bear one of the most enduringly sentimental and approachable Valentine's Day gifts, especially for new or younger relationships.

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• Champagne

  Champagne has been associated with romantic and celebratory occasions since French aristocracy popularized the sparkling wine in the royal court of Versailles in the 17th and 18th centuries, and its use at weddings and romantic dinners carried directly into the wine's later, broader association with Valentine's Day. The wine's production is legally restricted to a specific region of northeastern France under French and EU law — only sparkling wine made in the Champagne region, using specific grape varieties and the traditional secondary fermentation method, can legally carry the name — a protection that's helped preserve its status as a genuinely prestige product distinct from generic sparkling wine. Houses like Moët & Chandon, headquartered along Épernay's Avenue de Champagne — a stretch of road lined with grand champagne houses sometimes called "the most expensive avenue in the world" given the enormous cellars of aging wine beneath it — have marketed their product directly around romantic and celebratory occasions for well over a century. Its combination of centuries of association with French royal romance and a legally protected regional prestige that generic sparkling wine can't claim has made champagne one of the most classically elegant Valentine's Day gifts, particularly for couples celebrating anniversaries alongside the holiday itself.

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More in Holidays

• Lindt Gold Bunny

  The Lindt Gold Bunny, a hollow milk chocolate rabbit wrapped in distinctive gold foil with a small red ribbon and bell around its neck, was introduced by the Swiss chocolatier Lindt & Sprüngli in 1952 and became one of the most recognized premium chocolate Easter products in the world. The bunny's consistent gold foil design and small neck bell became instantly recognizable branding that Lindt has maintained essentially unchanged for over seven decades, giving it an unusually stable visual identity compared to most seasonal candy packaging, which is redesigned more frequently. Lindt's positioning of the Gold Bunny as a premium, gift-worthy chocolate item, priced above typical mass-market Easter chocolate, reflected the broader Lindt brand's identity as a higher-end Swiss chocolate maker extending its premium positioning into the seasonal Easter candy category specifically. The Lindt Gold Bunny's combination of its seven-decade unchanged iconic gold foil design and its premium positioning within Easter chocolate has made it one of the most recognizable seasonal chocolate products in the world.

• Jelly Belly Jelly Beans

  Jelly Belly was founded by the Herman Goelitz Candy Company, which introduced its distinctively true-to-life, intensely flavored gourmet jelly bean line in 1976, building a reputation around flavor accuracy that distinguished it from simpler, less flavor-varied jelly bean competitors. The company gained significant national visibility after President Ronald Reagan, a devoted fan, kept jars of Jelly Belly beans in the Oval Office and reportedly requested the company create a specific blueberry flavor in time for his 1981 inauguration, a well-documented piece of candy and political history. Jelly Belly's extensive flavor lineup, eventually including deliberately unusual and off-putting "Bean Boozled" flavors like actual dirt or vomit alongside its standard fruit and dessert flavors, reflected the brand's willingness to lean into novelty and shock value alongside its core gourmet flavor accuracy. Jelly Belly's combination of its Reagan-era White House association and its extensive, flavor-accurate product lineup has made it one of the most recognizable jelly bean brands associated with Easter baskets nationwide.

• Robin Eggs (Whoppers)

  Robin Eggs, a malted-milk candy produced by the Whoppers brand, coat the same malted milk ball center found in the standard year-round Whoppers product in a speckled, egg-like colored candy shell specifically designed to resemble small robin's eggs for the Easter season. The candy's speckled pastel coloring and small egg shape made it a popular choice specifically for filling Easter baskets and hiding during Easter egg hunts, giving it a distinct seasonal role separate from its parent Whoppers brand's typical year-round movie-theater-candy positioning. Robin Eggs occupy a specific niche among malted milk candy enthusiasts as a genuinely seasonal variant of a product otherwise available year-round, with some fans specifically preferring the candy shell texture of the Easter version over the standard chocolate coating of regular Whoppers. Robin Eggs's combination of its distinctive speckled egg-shaped design and its specific role as an Easter-basket and egg-hunt candy has made it one of the more visually distinctive candies associated with the holiday.

• Reese's Peanut Butter Eggs

  Reese's Peanut Butter Eggs apply the same chocolate-and-peanut-butter combination that made the original Reese's Peanut Butter Cup a bestseller, reshaped into a seasonal egg format specifically for Easter, and they have developed a passionate fan following that frequently argues the egg shape holds a superior peanut-butter-to-chocolate ratio than the standard cup. The product's seasonal-only availability window around Easter, similar to the strategy behind other holiday-specific candy shapes Reese's produces for Halloween and Christmas, helped drive concentrated seasonal sales spikes and sustained anticipation among devoted fans each year. Online debates over whether the egg, cup, tree, or pumpkin format of Reese's peanut butter candy is objectively superior became a recurring, genuinely popular piece of seasonal candy culture, with the Easter egg shape frequently cited by its defenders as having the best filling distribution of any shape the company produces. Reese's Peanut Butter Eggs's combination of its beloved core chocolate-peanut-butter recipe and its passionately debated shape-based fan culture has made it one of the most popular Easter candies in the country.

• Peeps

  Peeps, the marshmallow chick and bunny candy, were first produced by hand by the Rodda Candy Company in the 1920s before the Just Born candy company acquired the brand in 1953 and mechanized production, reducing what once took 27 hours per batch to just six minutes. The candy's bright, uniform coloring and simple marshmallow-and-sugar-crystal format made it an inexpensive, mass-producible Easter basket staple, and its shelf-stable nature contributed to its reputation, often made in jest, for having an unusually long, almost indestructible shelf life. Peeps became a genuine internet and pop culture phenomenon well beyond ordinary candy consumption, spawning "Peeps dioramas" contests at newspapers and museums, viral microwave-experiment videos, and a devoted fan subculture engaging with the candy as a creative medium rather than purely a snack. Peeps's combination of its mechanized mass-production origin story and its surprising second life as an internet and pop-culture phenomenon has made it one of the most culturally distinctive candies associated with Easter.