The History of May Day - by Anna

     Today is the first of May! (I can't take how fast this year has gone/is going!!) May 1st has been long recognized as May Day, but I didn't really know the history behind this "holiday" (if you want to call it that) until I decided to do a post on the history of May Day for TAJ. And here we are...

     May Day was originally a pagan holiday as a festival for the first spring planting. A queen was chosen, and young people danced around the May pole. The rituals were believed to help with the fertility of the harvest.

     As Europe became more Christianized, the holiday lost it's religious meaning and simply became a secular holiday for merrymaking and flowers, etc. The Roman Catholic church sometimes associates May Day with Mary (the mother of Jesus) and she is often depicted with a "May crowning" or a crown of flowers.

     In 1955, Pope Pius XII moved a feast day for Saint Joseph "the Worker" (the human father of Jesus) to May 1st to counterpoint the communist International Workers Day celebrations.

     That leads us to another association of May Day - International Workers Day. The video below gives a pretty good description:

   

     So that's how flowers and worker's rights came to be associated with the first of May. I hope this post was informational and you learned something. I sure did!

     Thanks for reading and check back next week for a post by Jessica!

~Anna