Often overlooked, the May Day holiday Friday may be the perfect coronavirus quarantine holiday in communities across America. The whole point in anonymously leaving a May basket of flowers at the door of a relative, friend or neighbor is to trot away without having been seen.
Let’s bring those May baskets back. This is a perfectly inspired way to let your peeps know you’re thinking about them from a safe distance.
You may be thinking, “OK, Boomer, never heard of May baskets.”
That’s understandable. May Day is a U.S. holiday, though it’s not widely observed except as a colloquial tradition kept alive in some pockets of the United States.
(And, no, May Day the holiday has nothing to do with the mayday, the international distress signal; Frederick Mockford, a senior radio officer at Croydon Airport in London, coined the phrase because it sounded like the French word “m’aider,” or “help me.”)
The May 1 tradition of heralding the arrival of warmer weather in the Northern Hemisphere dates back many hundreds of years and has been observed in different ways. In Medieval times, for example, people danced around a maypole — a pole festooned with ribbons and streamers — and placed baskets of flowers at the base in what historians believe was a fertility ritual. The imagery is all there.
Click Here: liverpool mens jersey
That tradition of whooping it up around the maypole never made it to the United States, though. The Puritans made sure of that, according to History.com.
But May Basket Day, as it was originally known, has a delightful history.
“A May-basket is — well, I hardly know how to describe it; but ’tis something to be hung on the door,” the Sterling, Illinois, Gazette wrote in 1871. “Made of paper generally, it contains almost anything, by way of small presents you have in mind to put in it, together with your respects, best wishes — love, perhaps. It is hung after dark at the door of anybody the hanger fancies. Which done, the said hanger knocks and scampers.”
The writer went on to explain that a proclamation of love via a May basket could work out badly for the boy, as in it would have been “a great disgrace,” if the girl caught him. Boys couldn’t catch a break either way. If a girl hung the basket, “it disgraces the boy again not to catch her.”
By 1889, May Day was anything but a day for frivolity in the United States. Three years earlier, on May 4, 1886, a nationwide strike over several days to demand eight-hour work days was bombed in Chicago, sparking a bloody riot later known as the “Haymarket affair” that left several police officers and protesters dead.
As Time remembered the incident:
Eight men were arrested and convicted of murder charges in a sensational, controversial trial in which no evidence directly linking the protesters to the bomber was offered. All were convicted; four were hanged, one committed suicide and three others were pardoned six years later.
Three years later, on May 1, 1889, a coalition of socialist and Marxist parties banded with labor groups at the International Socialist Conference in Paris and called for a demonstration to honor the “Haymarket martyrs.” A year after that, more than 300,000 people protested for better working conditions at a May Day rally in London.
From that point on, May Day became more of a celebration of labor than springtime flowers.