As I tell my girls, it’s the only day it is OK to knock on your neighbors’ door and run like heck.
It’s a tradition I grew up with in rural Kansas, and it is one I’m passing on to my own three daughters.
Every year, on May Day eve, the girls and I make cone-paper baskets that they design themselves. Sometimes we fill them with flowers if we have them. But we always pack them with homemade cookies. Then, on May 1, they creep up to the neighbors’ doors in our small town. They ring the doorbell and hide. They are often giggling as they run back to our home, thinking surely our neighbors couldn’t figure out who it is that is leaving a surprise hanging from the doorknob every year.
I’m sure most of our readers have fond memories of their own May Days. Yet, it seems, it is a tradition that is fading. It’s not as celebrated as it once was, I realized at my previous place of employment. I was talking about the preparations for the annual rite to my coworkers. They looked at me blankly. They had heard of May Day but didn’t know the history behind it, and they thought I was crazy when I told them about the ding-dong-ditch part of the holiday.
Moreover, I began to realize after their remarks, fewer children were participating in the day.
I was shocked, to say the least. The tradition had been so strong in the little community I grew up in. I looked forward to it every year. I couldn’t fathom how some had never heard of it.
May Day, after all, has a rich history, according to my research.
It can mark its beginnings to the Gaelic festival of Beltane—a pagan celebration honoring the start of the summer. It is also with an event honoring Flora, the Roman goddess of flowers.
European families migrating to America brought the tradition with them, but in a new, more Christianized form, according to an NPR story. They kept the May pole aspect and the May basket. Some even called it May Basket Day, thus the event of hanging baskets on doorknobs. Countless newspapers from the late 1800s talk about the day.
NPR relayed the story a reporter in the Sterling, Illinois, Gazette wrote in 1871 about the ritual.
"A May-basket is — well, I hardly know how to describe it; but ’tis something to be hung on a door. 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."
Today, the tradition still lives on in some pockets of rural America. And May Day is experiencing a rebirth of its own, of sorts, at schools, where the baskets are becoming part of an art project.
However, it’s more than keeping alive a folksy, few-centuries-old tradition that I want my children to remember. For me, May Day is about neighborly friendship. It’s about the spirit of giving. It’s about doing something for someone else and not expecting anything in return.
I think, sometimes in our fast-past, social-media-hyped society, we forget the simple things and the true meaning of community.
