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Happy May Day!
May. 1st, 2009 10:24 amFrom The Writer's Almanac:
Today is May Day, a holiday with its roots in the fertility celebrations of pre-Christian Europe. At Oxford University, otherwise intelligent young scholars jump off the Magdalen Bridge into a section of the Cherwell River that is two feet deep. At St. Andrews in Scotland, students gather on the beach the night before May Day, build bonfires, and then at sunrise they run into the very cold North Sea, some of them without any clothes on. There are bonfires and revelry in rural Germany. And there's hula dancing to the "May Day is Lei Day" song in Hawaii. In Minneapolis, there's the May Day Parade that marches south down Bloomington Avenue. It's organized by the In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre, now in its 35th year and attracting about 35,000 people.
May Day is also Labor Day for much of the world, a day to commemorate the economic and social improvements of workers, like the eight-hour workday. It evolved from the 1886 Haymarket Square riots, so in the United States, President Cleveland moved Labor Day to September to disassociate it with the radical left. In 1958, U.S. Congress under Eisenhower proclaimed May 1 "Loyalty Day" and also "Law Day" — two holidays that have not caught on. May Day is still a prominent holiday in communist countries like Cuba and the People's Republic of China. Two years ago, a May Day rally in Los Angeles in support of illegal immigrants turned into the L.A. May Day Mêlée after police fired rubber bullets into a crowd of demonstrators they had ordered to disperse.
Incidentally, the international distress signal code word "Mayday" has nothing to do with May 1st. It's actually derived from the French m'aider,meaning, come help me.
F. Scott Fitzgerald (books by this author) wrote a novelette entitled "May Day," which appeared in 1920.
Today is May Day, a holiday with its roots in the fertility celebrations of pre-Christian Europe. At Oxford University, otherwise intelligent young scholars jump off the Magdalen Bridge into a section of the Cherwell River that is two feet deep. At St. Andrews in Scotland, students gather on the beach the night before May Day, build bonfires, and then at sunrise they run into the very cold North Sea, some of them without any clothes on. There are bonfires and revelry in rural Germany. And there's hula dancing to the "May Day is Lei Day" song in Hawaii. In Minneapolis, there's the May Day Parade that marches south down Bloomington Avenue. It's organized by the In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre, now in its 35th year and attracting about 35,000 people.
May Day is also Labor Day for much of the world, a day to commemorate the economic and social improvements of workers, like the eight-hour workday. It evolved from the 1886 Haymarket Square riots, so in the United States, President Cleveland moved Labor Day to September to disassociate it with the radical left. In 1958, U.S. Congress under Eisenhower proclaimed May 1 "Loyalty Day" and also "Law Day" — two holidays that have not caught on. May Day is still a prominent holiday in communist countries like Cuba and the People's Republic of China. Two years ago, a May Day rally in Los Angeles in support of illegal immigrants turned into the L.A. May Day Mêlée after police fired rubber bullets into a crowd of demonstrators they had ordered to disperse.
Incidentally, the international distress signal code word "Mayday" has nothing to do with May 1st. It's actually derived from the French m'aider,meaning, come help me.
F. Scott Fitzgerald (books by this author) wrote a novelette entitled "May Day," which appeared in 1920.
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