Happy May Day

May 1st as a day of celebration--May Day--traces it's origins to northern European Germanic and Celtic tribes celebrating the first day of summer. In those times, spring began on February 1st, summer on May 1st. The beginning of May was the traditional "end of the dark wintry period" for northern Europe, and by having summer start on May 1st, you get to have the summer solstice, at that point in calendar history on June 25th, at "Mid-Summer", which became another reason to party.

Shakespeare's comedy, "A Mid-Summer's Night Dream" wasn't just a random description of a warm evening, but rather an identifiable-at-the-time event: the solstice, and most likely a party to boot.

Since the pagan days, and the christianizing of pagan celebrations (see Christmas vs Saturnalia), there are still northern European May Day celebrations, but sometimes now referred to as Walpurgis Night, named after the lass Saint Walpurga, a British lady who traveled to the Frankish Empire to assist with some conversions. The Franks, as you know, were a very successful Germanic tribe who left their home city, Frankfort--still the most populous city in Germany--and founded their own kingdom, calling it Frankreich. You might be more familiar with another spelling of the current country's name--France.

Saint Walpurga, popular in post-christianized Germanic populations and conveniently a woman, was able to blend in with the pagan and slightly Roman May Day celebrations of Flora, their goddess of flowers, and was canonized on, you might be able to guess, May 1st.

As the tradition of highjacking popular celebrations and implementing your own meaning has always been popular, the socialists and communists of the world highjacked the First of May as a day of celebration, and declared May 1st Labor Day, or International Workers' Day. In many countries that actually celebrate a Labor Day of some kind, it usually falls on May 1st. America uses Labor Day to mark the symbolic end of summer, and chooses the first Monday in September.

Here's a Soviet poster celebrating May Day. I enjoy the confident workers. My politics don't align with the Soviets, but icons of confident working people I feel more comfortable with than pagan-inspired post-christianized icons of Walpurga.