Hey this Sunday is May Day! Time to celebrate, surely – but celebrate what, exactly? The coming of spring? (SPRING!) And the flowers and the warmer days and really warm or even unpleasantly hot days arriving soon? Even though here in Boston some days aren’t all that wam just yet; only a week ago some of us had to deal with graupel. You heard right: graupel!
And you know it’s been spring for six weeks already, by some measures. Some of us recall that the spring equinox was all the rage back on March 21st. What was that about? Oh yeah, that was about the calendar – but a calendar is kind of an abstraction, and spring hasn’t really shown up in our hearts and minds until now, wouldn’t you say? After all, it’s the arrival of joy that is the true measure, and by now the joy is at long last finally getting real, if ever so gradually (“April is the cruelest month” etc) but the arrival of May the First means it’s time to break out the pole and the streamers and dance and frolic in the proper May Day manner! Be careful not to trip in your exuberance, though, wouldn’t want to spend the rest of the splendid times ahead hobbling around in a cast or a splint or some cumbersome knee brace, would we?
Of course there’s that other, more somber version of May Day, for those of a more historical or class-conscious persuasion: International Workers’ Day. If that suggests to you visions of folks gathering in Red Square in Moscow in those “worker’s caps” so beloved by that “other” Vladimir, comrade Ulyanov (better known as comrade Lenin) or Marxists from all over listening to stirring speeches and singing the Internationale (preferably in the original French) you’d be matching most of my own fantasies about IWD, which honestly are more romantic than factual.
IWD was indeed proclaimed by the Marxist International Socialist Congress in Paris in 1889, focusing on establishing the eight-hour work day, but they were only building on a precedent set by the American Federation of Labor, who’d called for a national labor strike in the US for that same eight-hour day back in 1886. If you’ve ever felt exploited on a job, which tends to be a fact of life for the unlucky many at some point in their lives, just remember that it was worse or way worse in the past, and improvements on this unfortunate state of human affairs have arrived slowly by fits and starts and with great struggle and it ain’t over yet, by a long shot. Just talk to any Amazon or Starbucks worker, for starters.
That 1886 strike ended in deadly violence at Haymarket Square in Chicago, by the way, and the first of May also became a day to commemorate that event and honor those who were lost. If you are getting a sense that IWD has a certain edgy anarchistic socialistic or dare we say communistic or omigod end-of-capitalism revolutionary flavor to it, you might begin to understand some of President Grover Cleveland’s reservations about it. Conveniently, the prez benefited from an ongoing years-long disagreement amongst organized labor in this country, some of whom had long preferred a kinder gentler “picnic and parade” holiday to honor the fine working people of This Great Land.
Which we sort of got, in the end, when our wise leaders in Washington created a federal holiday that President Cleveland signed into law in 1894. It is called Labor Day and it comes around in early September and is always part of a three-day weekend that makes for a great end of summer wrap-up before the kids go back to school. So what does labor have to do with it? There are always a few speeches here and there and many newspaper editorials, to which some pay attention, probably many of whom also focused on IWD back there on May 1st and who might also wish that more Americans (and Canadians, who also celebrate Labor Day) paid attention to IWD and its history and edginess, following the lead of more than 80 countries around the world.
In stark contrast with the serious, issue-laden but also ever-hopeful message of International Workers’ Day, we have the lighthearted, fun, and relatively joyous rapture that comes with May Day. This celebration has much deeper historical roots than the relatively recent story of labor history, and may indeed go back much farther than recorded events, since the advent of agriculture and the first organized human societies. The coming of spring predates homo sapiens by a great many years in itself, and by that point who’s counting?
“Spring celebration” is a concept that needn’t be explained here – you know what it is in your heart, at least if you live in a temperate zone – but there is one small detail that I find especially interesting and important that you might not know and I cannot allow this to happen, so please bear with me a bit longer.
Besides all that has been mentioned, here, the first of May is also about a specific milestone in the sun’s yearly ascent into the sky, as its travels alter how high it sits above the horizon, which changes on a daily basis. You never noticed this? That’s okay!
Hopefully (hope lurks everywhere in this discourse, if you haven’t noticed) you’ve heard of the solstice and the equinox, the former occurring twice, at winter’s and summer’s onset, the latter likewise in fall and spring. On the calendar it plays out on the 20th of December or thereabouts, as with June, September and March, respectively. The solstices are the days the sun is at the top and bottom of its travel, when the days are the longest and lightest or the shortest and darkest, and the equinox comes at the midpoint in the sun’s up-and-down journey above the horizon, when there are 12 hours of daylight as well as sunlight. Of course, you already know this!
Or you didn’t know this and are getting somewhat confused and bewildered or maybe simply burdened by too much information. At the most elemental level, it’s all about the light, and every living thing on the planet has a gut understanding of this, so go with your gut if that’s all you’ve got. Just remember the sun and the light right now are approaching maximum levels and you’re good.
Would you believe that agricultural societies since time immemorial – outdoor folks, exquisitely attuned to the daily movement of the sun – have also noticed and celebrated a second midpoint of each season, on its respective day? This happens four times a year (surprisingly, they’re known as cross-quarter days) and most everybody, except for wiccans and pagans and obsessives like myself, are unaware of this fact?
Those midpoint days happen to happen around the first day of February, May, August, and November, which more or less corresponds with Groundhog Day, May Day, Halloween, and a day in early August when they celebrate Lughnasadgh, the harvest festival in the British Isles and not much anywhere else, for the most part. Go figure. Maybe it’s time for some clever President to declare an official holiday a month before Labor Day, one where we all go fishing. Or swimming. Or read novels in hammocks. Choose your poison.
But as for this Sunday, try to appreciate the wonderful complexity of what it all means, the ancient celebration of the coming of the light and living in the natural world, as well as the fraught history of homo sapiens and their endlessly difficult relations with one another, which will likely never end. There are so many days of celebration in our lives as well as days of somber reflection; a day that combines both might have special value of its own. Think about it and have a great May Day whatever it means to you. Dance around that maypole wearing your worker’s cap maybe.
