May Day!

RHYS BOWEN: I was thinking about what to post today when I looked at the date and realized it was May Day. May Day doesn't mean much to most of us in America but when I was growing up it was a big thing in some English villages. I remember learning to dance around the maypole at my elementary school. It's not easy to make sure those ribbons don't get tangled up! And we crowned the Queen of the May.

 I was once in Padstow, Cornwall on May Day and they have the tradition of the hobby horse, or 'Obby 'Oss as it's called there. This sounds delightful but it's actually quite scary: a big black, round creature wearing a mask and pointed hat, and it's followed from house to house by a group of young dancers and musicians, all dressed in a red or blue bandanna. There are actually two 'Osses, the red horse and the blue horse and they cover different parts of the town.

The whole town is decked with flags and flowers. Only families who have lived in the town for two generations can participate. As it approaches each house there is some kind of ritual and everyone sings a song. It starts like this:
Unite and unite and let us all unite,
For summer is acome unto day,
And whither we are going we will all unite,
In the merry morning of May.
Arise up Mr. ..... I know you well afine,
For summer is acome unto day,
You have a shilling in your purse and I wish it were in mine,
In the merry morning of May.
All out of your beds,
For summer is acome unto day,
Your chamber shall be strewed with the white rose and the red
In the merry morning of May.
It didn't actually sound like that. Quite disturbing, actually.  It sounded pagan and primitive almost in a language I didn't understand. And of course it is a continuation of an old Celtic festival. Beltane.

I"ve been to other festivals in May. In Helston, Cornwall, they have the floral dance, or flurrie dance. All the villagers form a chain and dance in and out of the houses in the town. I presume, like the hobby horse, to bring good luck or good crops or a good summer.

I've been in Tuscany and Umbria in May. In Orvieto at Pentecost there is a medieval procession and band and a cage comes zinging down a wire across the main square to the cathedral where it explodes in a mass of fireworks. A man climbs up to retrieve the little cage and we were horrified to find it contained a live dove which was then presented to the archbishop. A symbol of the holy spirit.
In Gubbio teams of men race up a mountain with forty foot wooden candles on their shoulders to a special chapel. In Cortona we witnessed a crossbow competition complete with medieval pagentry.
I should point out that none of the above were done for tourists, in fact in Cortona there were hardly any outsiders. They are all carrying on local tradition.

This is one thing I miss in America. I don't know about you New Englanders, but here in California there are few festivals. We have a couple of parades on July 4. The big Chinese New Year parade in San Francisco. St. Patricks Day in San Francisco, oh, and Carnival and Gay Pride. But local traditions don't exist. In England and Europe you will find quirky little festivals throughout the year. The pancake race, the rolling cheeses down the hill race, the procession of First Communion children on Corpus Christi, the blessing of the harvest. On the Continent they are often linked to saints' days or religious celebrations. In England mostly to village lore. But the good thing is that everyone participates wholeheartedly. It's a reaffirming of hundreds of years of culture. And I miss them.

So, Reds and Readers, are there any festivals near you? Did they ever celebrate May Day when you were growing up?

DEBORAH CROMBIE: I agree, Rhys, that England has so many wonderful and quirky little celebrations. May Day and harvest festivals and cider festivals, and there is always that little spine-tingle of the pagan mixed in. I love Boxing Day, too, and what about the Scottish celebration of Hogmanay? Americans are sadly lacking, I fear, although most towns smaller towns in our part of the country make a big deal of the 4th of July, with parades and ice-cream competitions and chili cook-offs. Cinco de Mayo is a big deal in most parts of Texas, too.

JENN MCKINLAY: Rhys, I do remember making May Day baskets and leaving them on neighbor's front doors. It was so much fun to ring the bell or knock and run to hide behind a nearby tree and watch my mom or Mrs. Graham, my favorite neighbor, open the door and smile at the clump of wildflowers my brother and I had smashed into a paper doily cone fitted with a fuzzy pipe cleaner handle. At the time I thought they were spectacular displays but I'm guessing they were probably more enthusiastic than pretty. In Phoenix-Scottsdale, we have a lot of festivals that celebrate everything from Dia de los Muertos to the famous Parada del Sol horse parade to the annual Native American hoop dancing competition. I often hear that the desert has no culture. I couldn't disagree more. Our culture is a multicultural appreciation of our ethnic diversity and it is fabulous.

HALLIE EPHRON: No May Day festivals here... soon, though, Strawberry festivals when Strawberries come in.

When I was in elementary school we had a May Day school-wide dance performance, each grade doing a different dance, and sixth graders got to dance around the May Pole, weaving the ribbons over and under and over and under. I loved it so much.

Fourth of July is the big deal here in Boston, and worth a special trip if you can tolerate crowds.

INGRID THOFT: One of the things that I love about “Midsomer Murders” is that there’s often a fete going on in the village that somehow ties into the mystery.  As a result, DCI Barnaby has an extremely high fete attendance rate.

One festival that I hadn’t known of before we moved to Seattle is Hempfest.  Every August, a beautiful park on the Sound is taken over for all things hemp.  The official mission is to “educate the public on the myriad benefits offered by the cannabis plant.”  That may be, but the scent of marijuana emanates from that corner of the city for the whole weekend (not that different from Seattle these days).  The festival itself doesn’t bother me, but I’m always sad that our beautiful park gets trampled, only to regrow and be trampled anew the next August.  “You kids get off my lawn!”

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN:  May celebrations? You know, in TV, May is the big ratings month. It's called "the book. (That has a lot of subtext in our novel-world, but it means the May Ratings Book. And nothing about that my novel is also due May 1.) Anyway. The ratings the station gets in May set the ad rates for months to come. So for the last forty years, every May, I work every minute of every day on my TV stories to make them irresistible to viewers. Is it nice weather? I have no idea. I am big on celebrating June. The festival of "the rating book is over."
But! Our tulips are life-affirmingly wonderful.

LUCY BURDETTE: Oh Jenn, we used to make those May Day baskets too, in New Jersey. I have no idea how that tradition started! If you want festivals and events, you must come to Key West. Honestly, there is something happening every single week! This week as we left, the town was celebrating Conch Republic days, to commemorate the time the town decided to secede from the US in 1982. This happened because the US Border Patrol had set up a check point in Florida City to inspect all traffic going on and off the islands. (Hmmm, this is starting to sound familiar!)

You can read more about it here: https://conchrepublic.com/our-history/our-beginning/

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: : I seem to recall those May Day baskets, but I don't know if I actually participated as a child or just heard about the tradition. My children, now, all of whom went to parochial school in their early years, have many memories of May Day, which is still a BIG thing in Catholic elementary schools. There was a parade, and a couple of kids (presumably the most well-behaved that week) took a floral wreath and crowned a large statue of Our Lady. They sang, as I recall, "Bring Flowers of the Fairest" - "O Mary! we crown thee with blossoms today, Queen of the Angels, Queen of the May."

Of course, the Marian devotion is, as Debs and Rhys notes, the Christianized version of the ancient Beltane celebrations of fertility and abundance. It's a shame so many places have lost touch with these sorts of traditions that stretch back hundreds, if not thousands, of years. I suppose in a non-agricultural society, we just don't share the joy and gratitude of our ancestors at surviving the winter and returning to the season of warmth and food and light. Although here in New England we get pretty close at times...

RHYS: Oh yes, Julia. My children at Catholic kindergarten had a May procession with the best-behaved girl chosen to crown the statue of Mary. Needless to say none of my kids was ever chosen!__._,_.___

So who else remembers May Day traditions? Or other folksy festivals? And happy May Day everyone! Imagine that the Jungle Red Writers have left a cone of flowers on all your doorsteps!