Valentine’s Market @ Mudlark Oddities & Curiosities

Spooky gifts for your sweetie 🩇

📾: Courtesy Mudlark Oddities and Curiosities

Saturday, February 11th â€ą 4 – 10 pm

Mudlark Oddities is a hole-in-the-wall antique and curiosity shop that opened in Ravenna last October. They’ve got all the weird stuff you could want: taxidermic foxes and monkeys, a myriad of skulls (human and other), unnerving dolls, old photos with dead-eyed subjects staring directly into your soul, a lot of teeth, and more. And on Saturday, February 11th, they’re hosting a V Day market so you can get macabre gifts for your sweetie. 

If that doesn’t jive with your chocolate-and-roses-pinks-and-reds idea of Valentine’s Day, I’ve got some news for you. Mudlark’s creepy Valentine’s Day market may honor the true roots of Valentine’s Day more than the Hallmark version we’ve all embraced. The day has a gross, brutal history: The Romans would celebrate the Lupercalia feast from February 13th through the 15th. During these days, men would sacrifice goats and dogs and then whip women with the freshly slain animals’ hides. (The Romans thought hitting women would increase their fertility.) They also executed two guys both named Valentine on two different February 14ths, which is likely where the holiday name comes from. 

Something to chew on while you buy those chocolate and flowers. Or, surround yourself with the dark and the macabre at the Mudlark Oddities Valentine’s Day Market. 

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Author

Nathalie Graham

Nathalie is a writer focused on anything she finds weird or fun. Sometimes this includes local politics and the environment, sometimes this involves scootering half-nude in Tacoma. She used to work as a staff writer at The Stranger where she did a lot of that sort of thing. She detests dentists and loves costume parties.