Published May 1, 2005 in the Hibbing Daily Tribune
How’s that 8-hour day working out for you? If you’re happy about that, and you can’t help but notice that the days are getting longer and warmer, you need to stop what you’re doing and celebrate.
Today is May Day, and though the holiday started back in pagan times and is widely embraced by communists, don’t let that stop you from “getting’ down.” I guess for pagan communists, May Day is like Christmas. Only they wouldn’t call it that. Oh dear. I’ve created a situation.
First things first, radical theocracies now control many of the world’s nuclear weapons (except of course for our nuclear weapons, which are controlled by … well, never mind). Thus communists aren’t as scary as they used to be. It’s been all downhill for the reds since Rocky IV, so let’s give them a break.
As for the paganism, well, most of our holidays coincide with old pagan celebrations. Do you know why that is? The pagans had a different holiday for every day of the year. By and large, pagans didn’t have jobs, which is why they no longer call the shots geopolitically-speaking.
I’m sorry if my pagan jokes are angering people. It’s a dream of mine to anger a pagan to the point where they write me a letter. I’ve already offended most organized religions. I’m working on a set – angry representatives of multiple worldviews. You should see the leather-bound coffee book I have in the works.
OK, in truth May Day isn’t about paganism or communism. It’s about celebrating the advancement of the labor movement and enjoying the arrival of summer, or in our case, “Spring II: The Revenge of Unpredictable Weather.”
May Day also conjures up the connotation of “mayday,” a distress signal for sinking boats and crashing planes. Here’s hoping you enjoy May Day on your boat or plane, without having to declare “mayday.”
Many traditions make May Day special. A quick survey of Wikipedia.com yields many of them. For instance, there’s the popular “maypole,” and the dancing that goes with it. Magdalen College in England still follows elaborate May Day traditions including singing from rooftops. However, according to Wikipedia.com, revelers have ceased the once-common practice of throwing of red-hot coins from the top of a building to a crowd of people below. I, for one, hope we can revive that one, perhaps using collectible mint state Quarters. (“Ooo, look, it’s the Minnesota! Aaaaaa! My eye!”)
Besides England, May 1 is a cause for celebration in many European states. Ireland, Scotland, Finland, Germany all mark the date, as a holiday or some sort of “pagan awareness” opportunity. (You know how they blow the city sirens on “Severe Weather Awareness Day?” It’s like that in some places.) The fun part is that in Scandinavian culture, the day is linked to ancient Viking fertility. Oh yeah. Yet another reason to enjoy May 1.
Still, in modern times, May Day is mostly about the people who have sacrificed life and limb to advance the rights of workers. Here on the Iron Range, where conditions in the mines were once terrible, we can appreciate the fact that things are much better today. This wasn’t a free gift from some corporation, but something that other workers earned for us.
Isn’t that worth at least one frolic around the maypole?
Perhaps not all care to frolic; few Iron Rangers do. You can still take a day to enjoy the fact that winter is over and the only time we might crawl into a mine shaft for 12 hours is when we’re avoiding the red hot May Day coins raining down upon us.
Aaron J. Brown is a columnist for the Hibbing Daily Tribune.