May I?

Today is the day we flip the calendar to May to begin a whole new month of fun and frivolity, pandemic style. May 1 is a big deal elsewhere in the world. In Europe, it's always been the day that they celebrate the return of spring.  This dates all the way back to the ancients, the Greeks, the Romans, the Rolling Stones.

It sounds quaint, but in many places they spend today weaving floral garlands, bringing in sheaves of newly-green branches and wildflowers, and rigging up a Maypole, around which everyone danced. The legend was that such activities would encourage fertility of the earth and its people, and this is why so many people are born in March.  Are you one of them?  Maybe your parents danced around a Maypole!

Another interesting May Day thing was the belief that washing your face with morning dew would give one beautiful skin.  Although it must be pointed out that most May Day rituals never became popular in America, we did happily embrace the Mexican Cinco De Mayo holiday, and on the sixth of May, many Americans wake up with a faceful of lawn for a pillow and comforter.

Just not this year.

No, May Day never became popular here, because the puritanical Pilgrims thought such things to be pagan in nature.  But in some quarters, May 1 is the USA is International Workers' Day in celebration of the Haymarket Affair in Chicago, in 1886, when a strike among workers began in the quest to set the 8-hour workday as standard.

Now you know whom to thank for only having to work eight hours a day!