Roses are red. 

Violets are blue.

Nine-hundred-and-forty million flowers are traveling 

(through Miami)

to you. 

Workers at the Miami International Airport in Florida have processed about 940 million flowers recently. 

Why? For Valentine’s Day!

Take 10 flowers sold for Valentine’s Day in the United States. On average, nine of these traveled through Miami. The other one likely passed through Los Angeles, California. 

Roses. Carnations. Pompons. Hydrangeas. They arrive on hundreds of flights. Most of those flights come from Colombia and Ecuador. Their destination? Florist shops and supermarkets across the United States and Canada.

The largest flower importer to Miami is Avianca Cargo. That company is in Colombia. In the past three weeks, Avianca Cargo transported about 18,000 tons of flowers. The blossoms arrived in the United States on 300 full cargo flights. (Have you ever flown on a plane? Imagine a plane stuffed with flowers gliding through the sky.)

Avianca Cargo ships flowers all year ’round. But during Valentine’s season, the company moves more than twice as many as usual.

This becomes a big job for agriculture specialists at airports. These workers check bundles of blooms. They make sure harmful plants, pests, and foreign animal diseases don’t travel into the country on the flora and foliage. 

People have given each other valentines for more than 500 years. That makes us wonder. Where does Valentine’s Day come from? 

One legend is about a priest named Valentine. He was jailed for being a Christian. He wrote a letter to his jailer’s daughter. He signed his letter “from your Valentine.” Another story takes place during a time when marriage was illegal for young men in Rome. It says Valentine secretly married couples.

Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. — 1 Corinthians 13:4-8