Have you ever celebrated May Day?

May day when I was a child was celebrated at a celebration of spring. My mother and I would weave baskets out of paper and I would pick flowers and deliver the baskets full of flowers to our neighbors.

May Day Celebrations

My grandmother tells a great story about May Day being the day of the Virgin...for some reason the school she went to as a child crowned one girl each year 'the virgin' and this was done on May Day. Interesting but, strange to me to think of. Her actual story is how she was to be crowned but, this was during the depression and her family couldnt afford the white dress the virgin was to wear, and also would not accept it as a gift. So, poor gram, could not the May Day Virgin be.
Anyway, I remember when I was younger...grammar school and the May Pole out in the field. Once a year we took the play toys off of it and made little baskets to collect flowers and there were ribbons hung from the pole that we twisted around it. All I can remember about it though. It seems to be more of a time gone by.

Ugh, I don't like to remember the May Day, although I was only 13 when the Communism fell. For me it was a day off from school, although we had to dress up in the nasty pioneer uniforms that were scratchy and already way too hot to wear in May, chant slogans, waive flags, look at the parade of rolling tanks and marching army and such stuff. But that was the fun part. The worse part was that my father and his friends would get detained, as a prevention, so they don't plot some 'contra-revolutionary' demonstration or whatnot. if not beforehand, he would get detained May 2nd, for not going to the march (though it would be versed as 'subversion of the republic' or something other).
So it meant a lot. Nothing good. I therefore like pagan celebrations of spring much better than organized mass festivities of any kind. They can always turn ugly, and often they do.

Wow Dagmaraka,

That must have been something to go though. I'm an avid history nut, and personal accounts facinate me. Where are you from?

Duhh stupid me, I should have read the location under your avatar. Being american born and never been out of the western half of the US, I love to hear about other places. If you ever wanna talk about it, lemme know!

A few memorable May Days:

May 1st, 1975, "The Victory of Vietnam Illuminates the First of May", is read on the paper; cheering workers and students carry Vietnamese flags.
May 1st, 1982: breaking into the official march with protest banners.
May 1st, 1983: mingling into the official march, preparing a general strike for June 1st.
May 1st, 1984, as a part of the official march, protesting the government's backlash against the organizers of last year's general strike (us).

Most May Days between 1989 and 2000, working at the newspaper. Feeling strange for having to work, but happy for not marching in a hot day.
The last two years: relaxing at home, eating out, as in a sunday.

Dag...interesting! Thanks for sharing that with us as it doesnt sound so much like fond memories we are usually easy to share with others.
Pagan celebration of Spring...I like that actually..and have noticed myself that most pagan celebrations a great deal more fun than say...governmental.

HISTORY OF MAY DAY

Thanks, all. Very varying experiences, from vivid recollections of the opposite ends of experiencing the politics of May Day (fbaezer and dagmar) to - pagan rituals. Now that's an angle I hadn't expected! Although, yes, of course, now that y'all mention it ... Dancing around the May pole, indeed, I believe that's what the youngsters who'd joined the "red" version of the scouts did back in earlier decades of last century, too. Anyone able to elaborate on how the link between the two things evolved?

When I was a kid (1970s), May Day really already wasn't very alive anymore. The Labour party would organise a festive meeting for the party faithful in the local community centre. (The communists had already become much too small to organise anything much - round where I lived, in any case). Some enthusiasts were trying to breathe new life into the tradition, my mother being one of them. I distinctly remember being on stage with a few other 10-year-olds (+/-), doing a little play about, oh, a better world and how to fight for it, I would guess <grins>.

I can't remember being particularly fond of the day at the time, although the community centre was one of those organic architecture things, and thus had oddly shaped corridors you could run through and hide in. The alderman's daughter was a bit of a bore, but my mother's best friend was a councillor like her, and her son was my best mate, so he was there too <grins>. It was kinda like a big family, really. Everybody knew each other. There was song and dance, and a bit of drink (though I'm sure not too much, out of respect for the older teetotaller generation).

It's probably because of that family feeling connotation, as well as a couple of other related things, that the idea of May Day nowadays makes me feel a bit nostalgic. The whole thing of those young 1970s parents trying to breathe new life into it is part of a whole world of - experiences, ideals and aspirations, communities and - more - that's now truly all but disappeared. I have to seek hard to find any trace of it back. With that, May Day turns out to have become one of those moments of personal commemmoration, grief even, for me, on which I pay tribute to the boundless optimism and aspiration of my mother - and her like.

Last week, I scoured the web to see if anything at all still happened here in Holland. Not much whatsoever. Radical Trotskyites joined up with migrant groups to use the day for mini-protests against the war, or against the occupation of Palestine. Squatters held an impromptu demo in Amsterdam with anarcho-punk music. The New Communist Party (0,1% of the vote) gathered its remaining three dozen youth members in Cafe Damsterdammertje in Groningen, capital of the only province where they've got more than one local councillor left. None of that really rings any bell for me.

Then suddenly I saw a small announcement. The Labour party of my childhood town is - asleep, I'd guess. (After one set of local elections a few years ago, I happened upon a local newspaper from around there, and saw the man my mother once almost fell in love with, still sporting his huge beard - though it was now grey - pictured passport-photo size as one of two remaining town councillors for a party decimated in the onslaught of a local party brandishing the adjective "Independent", founded to resist big-city taxation. (How much smaller a depiction of lost dreams - of the loss of dreaminess - can one find?)).
But in the neighbouring big city in question, they still lay flowers at the monument of Troelstra, the Labour leader of the 1910s and 20s, who did much to get the 8-hour working day installed (I believe). And the occasion was framed by speeches, of course, and an appearance of ... the "Struggle Choir" from the suburb I grew up in. A choir my mum helped to set up back in the eighties. They still existed! Who would ever have thought?! I wonder what they do - there isnt much to sing at anymore, nowadays. But there you are. They still exist! <shakes head in wonder>

Laying flowers at an otherwise forgotten monument to a figure of now remote history, attended I'm sure only by the older members, who still remember "father Drees" who earned them their current old age pension - and who modestly maintain their tradition and loyalties even when their party has dropped all the red-flag and singing-the-Internationale kind of paraphernalia close to twenty years ago - now there's something that will touch a historian with a penchant for grieving over lost heritage - and it turns out my mother's old choir still exists and is actually singing there!

I wasn't able to go there, yesterday, and I am finding it very hard, very hard to forgive myself for it.

I'm sorry I was so terribly verbose up there, in recollections that are so very trivial compared to those dagmaranka and fbaezer wrote about briefly, for example. They are beyond all sense of proportion, in that respect. It's only b/c a) I am excuciatingly unable to summarize and b) this forum is, I guess, my (only) outlet for this kind of thing ...

I have celebrated it lots! Some memorable nights - dancing, singing, flying down mountainous and dangerous staircases on very high heels drunk as a lord!

I helped form a trade union choir here - we used to perform at all of them - parade and dinners.

I do not bother too much now, sadly. Oh - I guess the dinner is tonight!

Verbosity is nothing to apologize for, nimh, especially here, and especially when done in such a readable and interesing manner.

I started to say that we don't celebrate May Day in the States, but I suddenly had a recollection of a cotton sundress, which wafted around searching for something to attach itself to, like Arthur Dent's "yellow". I eventually remembered helping to organize some sort of major protest slash parade on May Day in 1989. Most of the people who were organizers/ participants were punks and/ or baldies (anti-racist skinheads) wearing wifebeaters and cargo pants and docs, and I pondered what to wear since I was already sartorially suspect with my waist-length hair, and decided hell with it I want to wear my sundress (a vintage find at Ragstock, 50's, full skirt, wonderful) and I did and it was a beautiful spring day and I had fun.

What can I say, I was 18. The cause we were organizing the protest for eludes me, but the sundress remains.

I remember mayday with fear of reprisal and dread. it all began with Sister MAry George, or Attila the Nun, as we called her. Sr MG would hand out these little cardboard and tin CASH receptacles with a stern lecture about how the blessed Mother would be watching and she wanted to see dimes and quarters in there AND NO PENNIES!!!
I was traumatized, to this day I cannot look at a can of tuna or Dinty Moore stews without thinking of hoe Catholic school took my malleable little mind and screwed it up to the point that Im afraid of so many things that everyone takes for granted.
See, the NON-Catholic world (how does that make you feel? all the rest of you who are NON_CATHOLICS), non Catholics must understand that May is the month of Mary, and she is made a very big deal of, with parades and schlifkie baskets covered with blue ribbons , and white and blue flower bouquets that we were always having to buy so we wouldnt go to Hell.
The CAtholic Church had so many ways to make you go to hell that you were always shelling out cash to intervene and give you a stay till next yeaqrs "hellothon". It was like a PBS station that was on a 24/7 pledge drive. Except, instead of the crappy chochkies they give away on PBS, goin to HEll is what the church gave out unless you dug deep and gave up your fun money'
I always wondered why I was so F'd up.

quinn & farmerman - late posting here, but May Day was the Virgin's Day for me as well. The girls would get dressed up in there best and there would be a parade with Mary being carried on a platform with a crown of flowers on her head into the Chuch for May Day mass. It was a big deal to get 'picked' to be a part of the procession and carry flowers into the Church and lay them at the feet of the statue.

My great aunt gave us 'May baskets' too. Baskets with pretty paper flowers on them and candies in them.

Between farmerman and Sugar I dont know who to say sorry and who to say interesting to however, I think both work for both in somehow the same strange and twisted religous way.
Glad to have more information though.

In Rogues Island there is a unique May custom --the 'May Breakfast'. (first celebrated by a Cranston R.I. church in 1868). Churches, civic groups, senior centers, and some businesses
prepare a sumptuous breakfast with eggs and bacon, ham, fresh fruit, muffins, flowers etc. etc. It's a rite of Spring around here.

May breakfasts don't have to be on the first day of May. They are usually in the first week or sometimes the second week of the month. Last weekend the Providence Journal listed 50+ May breakfasts in the 'Community Events' section of the paper.

As an interloper from Masachusetts I encountered the May Breakfast phenomenon at my first job in this state. My employer allowed staff to bring in and prepare a 'pot Luck' breakfast and use an hour of 'company time' first thing in the morning.

Anyone who has experienced the cameraderie and fellowship of a church supper or a small town outing has a sense of what this lovely Spring event is like.

That was a really, really pretty post, Soz <nods, smiles>. Very well written, evocative, sensitive. Pretty. One to frame <nods>

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I started a thread about May Day protests a coupla days ago, forgot about it, remembered it again, and then some vague memory about having once, before, started a May Day thread here came floating up, much like Soz's sundress - and here it is, I found it back. And what a cool short thread it was too, fascinating how this one day meant such completely different things to each of the posters.

Ooh and do I remember that day too, three years ago, when I started this thread, and when I wrote that post of mine above about not having gone to The Hague and it having been "hard". Oh I remember it and the state we were in at the time and how we were going to go, how much I had planned to go and how much it meant to me, and how sad I was when we f*cked up, when I messed up, and it was all too late already and halfway through the day, and the curtains closed and sleep and oppressive semi-agressive apathy in the room. And how I cried my eyes out over that and felt so completely f*cking guilty, toward my dead mother I mean, for not having gone. A stupid day, but it sure serves to represent that bit of my life, there, back then, almost incredible.

By the way, I did end up going, <grins>, a year later, when the air was clearer and situation wholly different - with my dad. Met some old acqaintances too. I musta wrote about it in the WMYST thread. Wait a sec...

No, it wasnt here, cos I was off from A2K that month (fed up with it for some reason), and had migrated back to Abuzz for a bit. So I posted about it there.

Not much tho, just a coupla words, in my memory I'd mentioned more about it. Like about the old friend/colleague of my father's who was active in the party back when he was too, that is: some thirty years before; a gentle man, with whom I immediately got into a self-evident, interesting convo.

Instead, it had just this: