How did you celebrate May Day as a child? I grew up in a mining town where our workers bonded over six-packs after the shovels stopped. Unlike the slaves of the Soviet empire, they had earned no holiday to wear armbands and march with tanks.
In 1962, I was six years old and cynical. May baskets and celebrations of romance were for the pretty girls. My thick glasses and angry demeanor didn't earn me many invitations to dance around the Maypole, so I warmed the bench with my nose in a book. That summer, I flunked out of vacation Bible school, firm in the knowledge that history had many witnesses. Not all of them agreed with Jehovah.
Like so many pagan holidays, May Day was appropriated to suit the needs of a new society. Eric Hobsbawm, noted Socialist historian, calls the workers' May Day an "invented" tradition, a necessary tool toward Socialism's gaining recognition as an emerging institution.
The May Day spirit of new beginnings was ideally suited to a budding labor movement eager to win the right to an eight-hour day. Thus, the Roman festival honoring Flora, bringer of spring flowers and long days, was reborn as a 19th-century, Socialist love-in.
The Second Socialist Internatio-nale of 1898 chose May 1 wisely when they designated it as a workers' holiday. All of the traditional symbols of Beltaine, including the Celtic Bright Fire, were equally at home whether the holiday stood for the struggle for equality and freedom from toil or a celebration of spring.
While the workers' fight was an honorable one, it's not surprising that a Communist holiday would later fall victim to crass commercialization in the 1990s. Moscow May Day organizers now sell souvenirs and ad space. As so often has happened in the past, the exploitation of a pagan holiday continues, taking a new twist.
Some of May Day's interesting dichotomies lie between the labor and the love festival, the public appropriation and pagans' fight to keep May Day sacred. What do we do when everything that represents our religion is commercialized?
Perhaps it's time to return to the original meaning of Beltaine. Equality and freedom from toil are goals worthy of respect. But in focusing on the release from work, we focus on work still. The original sacred impetus for Beltaine was bringing in the spring: celebrating Nature regreening, and celebrating the sap rising in ourselves. This year, let's put the Beltaine back in Beltaine.
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