Making May Day merry
From bonfires to baskets to Maypoles, the day inspires colorful celebrations
Colorful celebration from bonfires to baskets to Maypoles
In a week or so the calendar will flip from April to May. While May 1 might be just another day on the calendar for most of us, throughout history it held special significance as the midpoint between the spring equinox and summer solstice.
From roaring bonfires to a Maypole bedecked with ribbons and flowers, community picnics and sweet flowerfilled baskets left anonymously on a neighbor’s doorstep, May Day has a few traditions worth bringing back.
May Day has been celebrated by different cultures as the launch of summer, good weather and the season of abundance.
In Celtic tradition, it was called Beltane, a holiday marked by large fires and herdsman driving flocks to new, green pastures. It was a festival of renewal and fertility.
Nineteenth-century Victorians sought to tame the sometimes wild Celtic rituals, transforming it into a celebration of spring, maidens and virtue. The traditional English May Day’s most familiar symbol is the Maypole. A large wooden pole was set up with colorful ribbons attached to the top. Young girls and boys danced around it, each holding the end of the ribbon as they circled, changed places and weaved different patterns.
A tradition regularly practiced in different parts of this country a generation ago, but less so now, was delivering May baskets. A homemade basket, usually fashioned from paper, was filled with seasonal flowers or edible treats. The giver would hang the basket on a friend or neighbor’s doorknob, ring the bell and run away.
Children delivered baskets to neighborhood elders, and young people sometimes delivered baskets to a love interest. Some traditions said if the receiver of the basket caught the giver, a kiss would be exchanged.
At Folklore Village in Dodgeville, the maypole tradition lives on. Becky Rehl, communications associate for the folk arts and culture center, is busy preparing for this year May 6 Maypole Dance Family Evening, which has been celebrated for decades. Potluck begins at 5:30 p.m. and will be followed by dancing around a beribboned Maypole. (Go to for additional details.)
Rehl remembers stories recounted by Folklore Village founder Jane Farwell, who died in 1993. In the 1930s Farwell attended school in Madison, where students spent weeks preparing for May Day.
“They gathered in a city park and each school was represented by a Maypole dancing team,” Rehl said. “They practiced and practiced, each school had its own colors of ribbons, moms sewed dresses for the girls, boys wore vests — what spectacle, can you imagine?”
Rehl herself remembers handing out paper May baskets filled with flowers as a child in Appleton, where it “remains a vivid tradition,” she said.
“I have friends who still do that with their children. I remember putting them on the neighbor’s doorknob, ringing the doorbell and running away. The fun part was always ringing the bell and running.”
Joan Gage, a journalist and artist who now lives in North Grafton, Mass., was born in Shorewood in 1941 and remembers leaving paper baskets of flowers for neighbors both in Milwaukee and later in Edina, Minn.
They picked whatever was in bloom, usually grape hyacinth, violets, bleeding hearts and forsythia.
When her husband, Nicholas Gage, became regional correspondent for the New York Times in Greece in 1977, Gage practiced the Greek tradition of May wreaths with her children.
Using the bountiful flowers (including roses) blossoming in suburban Athens in May, residents weave baskets that are hung on the door to dry. They remain in place until June 24, St. John the Baptist’s birthday, when they are tossed into the fire. Everyone leaps over the flames as a fresh start at midsummer.
Gage switched back to making May baskets with her children when they moved to Massachusetts in 1982.