Bring back May Day celebrations

Of all days to celebrate spring, May Day is really the best.

The first day of spring is in cold wintery March. Easter weather is usually not much better, but by May 1, spring is truly here in Hampton Roads.

When I was young, my school held a traditional May Day celebration. We crowned a May queen with a wreath of flowers and danced around a maypole weaving multicolored streamers into a pattern around the pole.

Betty Ann Galway, lifelong learning program manager at Norfolk Botanical Garden, remembers making tissue paper flowers in school to give her mother on May Day. Chains of daisies woven together were a popular May Day activity at many colleges. In the 19th and early 20th centuries folks celebrated this colorful transition from cool spring to almost-summer by making May baskets filled with flowers and sweet treats. Often the baskets were hung on the doorknob at friends and neighbors' homes anonymously.

But May Day traditions have faded away like dying flowers. Several May Day observations in Europe are now labor celebrations, similar to our Labor Day, about as far from maypoles as you can get.

Since everyone loves to give and get flowers, try reviving a May Day tradition or two this week. You could introduce your children to May Day and help them make May baskets of flowers to deliver to neighbors on Thursday. Or make your own baskets.

You can spend May Day at a class with Galway at the botanical garden where she will teach you how to make a May Day wreath - two, in fact: one for you and one to give away.

To make your own simple May baskets for neighbors or friends, use a small metal, wicker or plastic basket from a craft shop where you can also buy some pretty ribbon. Line the basket with a plastic doily, Galway suggested. Use a small piece of oasis and arrange a bunch of posies cut from the yard. You can pretty it up by weaving ribbon among the flowers. Children can make cone-shaped May baskets out of construction paper or stiff wrapping paper, using staples or tape to hold the shape. Staple a pretty piece of ribbon on either side of the top of the cone as a handle. The kids can pick flowers and wrap the stem ends in wet paper towels. Stick the paper towel and stems in a plastic baggie and then put them in the May basket. A doily at the top with a hole in the center for the stems would give it a finished touch.

Participants in Galway's class will decorate bleached willow wreaths with fresh flowers, twining ribbons around the flowers and wreath. But you could use other natural wreaths like grapevine wreaths to make your own.

P.S. If you are at Kingsmill Resort and Spa this spring, look for the Kingsmill Tulip, a stately butter-colored tulip cultivated especially for Kingsmill by European tulip growers. More than 2,000 of the bulbs are planted around the resort conference center.

Mary Reid Barrow, barrow1@cox.net