It’s May Day!

There are so many things that May conjures up for me… weddings, graduations, holidays, and of course, May Day itself. May 1 is one of *those* holidays… it started as a Celtic religious festival (Beltane). Then sometime early in the first millennium, it was appropriated by the early Christian missionaries as a holy day honoring Mary. During the English Renaissance, which began with the Tudors and flourished under Elizabeth I, many of the old Catholic holidays metamorphised into folk holidays.

May Day was no exception. For the next couple of centuries, it devolved into a day celebrating folk dances and legends in England.

I remember as a child dancing around the maypole. I and all of my grade wove cloth ribbons as we danced over and under each others’ arms. I also remember reading Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s slightly (okay, more than slightly) saccharine poem, The May Queen. Warning if you look it up… the original had only two verses, May Queen and New Year’s Eve. Tennyson added to it several years later, as poets are wont to do. The concluding verse has more than slightly Christian religious overtone. It’s a favorite poem of mine, though, so I recommend it to anyone who likes sappy Victorian poetry.