By David E. Hubler
Contributor, EDM Digest
To many Americans, “Mayday” is a distress call. But in many countries, May Day has long been celebrated as the halfway point to summer.
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According to the Old Farmer’s Almanac, May 1 astronomically marks the halfway date between the spring equinox and the summer solstice. “It’s one of the Celtic cross-quarter days, which celebrated the midway between all solstices and exquinoxes of the year.”
The Celts, a northern European people, suffered through terribly long, cold winters during the Iron Age and later. Their main source of sustenance came from agriculture. No wonder then that May Day’s roots go deep into agriculture.
‘Bringing in the May’ Celebrations Included Gathering Wildflowers and Weaving Floral Garlands
“Springtime celebrations filled with dance and song hailed the sown fields starting to sprout. Cattle were driven to pasture, special bonfires were lit, and both doors of houses and livestock were decorated with yellow May flowers,” the Almanac explained. Later, the “bringing in the May” celebrations included gathering wildflowers and green branches, the weaving of floral garlands, the crowning of a May king and queen, and the setting up of a decorated May tree or Maypole, around which people danced.”
These rites originally were most likely intended to “ensure fertility for crops and, by extension, for livestock and humans.”
Nowadays, May Day is largely a European observance marked in schools by wrapping a Maypole with colorful ribbons and dancing around the pole. The tradition is a carryover from when Celts danced around a living tree praying for good crops and fertility.
May Day Courtships and Marriage Six Weeks Later Started the ‘June Wedding’ Tradition
“For younger people, there was the possibility of courtship,” the almanac notes. “If paired by sundown, the courtship continued so that the couple could get to know each other and married 6 weeks later on June’s Midsummer’s Day. This is how the ‘June Wedding’ became a tradition.”
The Puritans are mostly to blame for why these European customs never gained wide acceptance in the American colonies and by extension in the U.S. That strict religious sect considered May Day celebrations “to be licentious and pagan,” and they banned all such observances.
Today the Maypole dance is mainly celebrated in schools and colleges “as a fun spring tradition and sometimes medieval festival,” the almanac says.
Deadly Riot in Chicago Gave Birth to May Day as a Workers’ Holiday
The Second International socialists and communists meeting in Paris in 1889 appropriated May Day to commemorate the deadly Haymarket workers’ protest in Chicago three years earlier. The gathering also set May Day to honor the accomplishments of workers of the world.
“Nowhere, however, was May Day celebrated with more fervor than in the USSR and its client states,” says encyclopedia.com. “As elsewhere, it was a public holiday with demonstrations of worker solidarity, but with the onset of the Cold War it increasingly became a propaganda show for Soviet technological achievements and military might.”
Communist Usurpation of May Day Was the Final Nail in the Coffin for Any Formal US Observance
Ironically, a movement born to commemorate a deadly riot in the U.S. never rose to a recognized holiday here. The communist usurpation of May Day was the final nail in the coffin for any formal U.S. observance.
So how did “mayday” become a recognized call for help? Wasn’t S.O.S. (sometimes thought to translate as Save Our Souls) good enough? Well, no.
“Mayday” first came into English usage in 1923, according to Merriam-Webster. “There was a lot of air traffic between England and France in those days, and evidently there were enough international problems over the English Channel that both parties wanted to find a good distress signal that everyone would understand.”
The “ess” sound in S.O.S. was difficult to understand in the crackly electronic transmissions of the day. Citing a February 2, 1923, Times of London story, “New Air Distress Signal,” Merriam-Webster explains: “Owing to the difficulty of distinguishing the letter ‘S’ by telephone, the international distress signal ‘S.O.S’ will give way to the words ‘May-day’, the phonetic equivalent of ‘M’aidez’, the French for ‘Help me.’”
The new call quickly spread across the nascent world of aviation. The U.S. formally adopted it as the official radiotelegraph distress signal in 1927.
We do not know whether “Mayday” was part of Charles Lindbergh’s vocabulary on his historic solo flight from New York across the Atlantic and the English Channel in May of that year. Even if he did know the new distress call, “Lucky Lindy” never had to use it because he fortunately landed safely in France.
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