Happy May Day thoughts!

Ist of May - Fête du travail, Festa dei Lavoratori, Fiesta del Trabajo. Many European countries celbrate today.

So here in the UK we continue to work, apart from those of us who have given up the habit. We talked about it in the Italian class yesterday, our teacher totally confused as to why in the UK we don’t have a celebration of workers but choose to have Morris dancers prancing around on the first Monday in May.

Apparently they had a May Day celebration back in the Roman Republic. I doubt if it had much to do with workers’ rights back then and it came to be associated with pagans who used the day to welcome summer with bonfires and celebrations. That fits in with people in Germanic countries celebrating Walpurgis Night to mark halfway between the spring equinox and the summer solstice. And the Morris dancers fit in nicely with that as well.

On the whole, there seems to be a lot of pagan stuff around when you look into these festivals. So May Day is all about marking the start of Summer… even if it is still a little chilly out. That’s because in pagan tradition, February 1 was the first day of spring, May 1 was the first day of summer, and Midsummer was the date of the summer solstice. Walpurgis included dancing, a big feast, kissing young women and was known as a night when witches awaited the arrival of spring. In Spain they celebrate the feast of Saint John, or rather Saint John”s eve, with bonfires, leaping over the said bonfires, a fair amount of eating and drinking, on June 23rd. That sounds like a midsummer pagan thing to me.

In the 19th century, May Day was combined with International Workers’ Day, or Labour Day, when labourers protested for an eight-hour working day. Nowadays Labour Day in the USA is November, I believe. That may well have been a move not to be associated with anything remotely communist but I may well be doing the Americans a disservice there. I have no evidence to back that theory up.

We may not have May Day itself as a holiday but we have had bank holidays for a good while. Launched by Liberal politician and banker Sir John Lubbock in 1871, bank holidays or public holidays were introduced as a way of giving workers respite. It was stated that on four days across the year, people shouldn’t be expected to do what they wouldn’t do on Christmas Day. So there were some people looking out for the workers even then. Now, England has eight bank holidays across the year including Good Friday and Christmas Day and they differ in Ireland and Scotland.

And we probably won’t be demonstrating for workers’ rights either. Maybe we should do so, however, as loads of shop workers, leisure centre workers, bar and cafe and restaurant workers will all be beavering away to make the day’s holiday really good for the rest of us.