May Day

Today is May 1st, or May Day, a holiday that never quite took off. When I was a very small child I think we might have made a maypole and danced around it, like pagans, but there's not much going on in the May Day celebrations of today, if there are any.

As with almost all holidays, May Day has pagan origins. It started with the Romans, and was a celebration of flowers. A may festival from Germany, Walpurgisnacht, was Christian, as it celebrated St. Walpurga. This has become known as Witching Night, as celebrants prayed to St. Walpurga to keep witches from eating their children and other nasty things.

Another holiday of this time (which is roughly halfway through spring) is Beltane, brought to us by the Gaels, which was a recognition of the coming of summer. Eventually Roman Catholics co-opted the day, as they did with so many other days having to do with the orbit of the Earth around the sun, as veneration of Mary, and the crowning of a May Queen.

Then May Day became associated with workers' rights. To commemorate the Haymarket bombing, which occurred on May 4, 1886, socialist and communist organizations proclaimed International Workers' Day, and has over the years become a day for organizations to stage protests, and at times riots. Eventually May 1st became a big day in the Soviet Union, when they would show off their might with military parades. Though this originated in the U.S., the first Monday of September came to be recognized as Labor Day, and there have been attempts to move it to May 1st, to no avail. Labor Day now means the start of school, not having much to do with workers.

As for the maypole, I've found some interesting suggestions for what it may symbolize. Is it the Earth turning on its axis? Not likely, considering this started before everyone would accept that the Earth was round. Could it be the Tree of Life? Or might it be a phallus? Opinions differ. Incidentally, did you ever wonder where the word May came from? It seems to be Roman as well, for the goddess Maia, who was the wife of Vulcan. Somewhere along the line somebody named these months and they stuck.

I don't know if there were any May Queens named today, but they may all think of the line in "Stairway to Heaven," "If there's a bustle in your hedgerow, don't be alarmed now, it's just a spring clean for the May Queen," which may be the most obscure line in rock and roll history. I don't know if Robert Plant has ever explained it.