“It’s May! It’s May! The lusty month of May,” according to Queen Guinevere in Camelot. It’s the month when large showy May apple blossoms explode in shady spots.
It was already a quaint old custom when I was a boy, in the days of quaint old Eisenhower, but we still made May baskets of flowers, and hung them on the unsuspecting doors of loved ones.
That was on May Day, the first of May, a day fraught with multiple meanings through time and space. Going back to 1889, May Day is International Workers Day (the original “labor day”), a day for celebrating working people and their solidarity, persevering through violence and retribution.
In Catholicism, May Day begins a month of special devotion to the Virgin Mary. Half-way between the spring equinox and the summer solstice, May Day was also Beltane in ancient Celtic societies. In addition to that, it’s the traditional date that European herds and flocks were taken up to the high pastures.
Dancing around the maypole is a very old custom is some German-speaking and English-speaking societies. “The Maypole of Merry Mount,” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, is based on an event in the days of the Pilgrims and Miles Standish, but as usual Hawthorne served his own purposes by rewriting the facts almost out of recognition.
May may have been named (scholars disagree) for the Greek and Roman goddess Maia, associated with growth, and certainly in our part of the world, May is the month that finally kills winter dead, and embarks on a riot of blossom, growth, and green.
Decoration Day, now Memorial Day, traditionally took place on May 30, nowadays falling on May’s last Monday. Our neighboring Waterloo is traditionally one of the birthplaces of Memorial Day.
May 8 is V.E. Day, for victory in Europe in 1945. It was an explosion of ecstatic celebration in Britain, which had lived under the gun for almost six years, and America celebrated wildly as well. But reaction in the Pacific Theater of Operations is summed up by the old tale of an officer who announced, “The war in Europe is over. There will now be a five-minute break.”
Free Comic Book Day comes on the first Saturday in May – maybe I’ll see you at Heroes Your Mom Threw out, in Elmira Heights! That’s also Kentucky Derby day, and the Preakness comes later in the month. May the Fourth is when the first lasting English settlement was established in today’s U.S. It’s also a special day for “Star Wars” fans (May the Fourth be with you – get it?). Cinco de Mayo, originally a minor observance in Mexico, has become a U.S. celebration of Mexican-American heritage. (Mexican-Americans have been citizens since back in the 1840s, WAY before the families of millions of other Americans, including Donald Trump, ever set foot on our shores.)
Apart from Memorial Day, Mother’s Day is May’s biggest celebration, and why not? The nurture we get from our mothers sets our course through all our lives.
Any observance will be grim this year, but with May’s last weekend comes Kyiv Day, celebrating the 1500 year-old Ukrainian capital.
My home state of Rhode Island beat everybody else by two months, declaring independence on May 4, 1776. (King George must have trembled.) Lindbergh flew the Atlantic in May, the Red Cross was founded, and the Golden Spike was driven. The unanimous Brown vs. Board of Education decision was announced in May, adding its weight to the wave of gigantic changes finally improving America.
Our own Glenn Curtiss was born in Hammondsport on May 21, 1878, and on his 30th birthday he piloted his first airplane flight, in Pleasant Valley. Other May births include Malcom X, Bob Dylan, Queen Victoria, Clint Eastwood, Stevie Wonder, John Wayne, Plato, Karl Marx, Mother Jones, and Harry S Truman. Happy May.