Is May Day a communist holiday or a spring festival? Well, it's both, actually

How will you celebrate May Day? With flowers in a basket, or a communist uprising? 

Technically, either one is correct.

May Day— May 1— is a spring festival in many parts of the world. It is also International Workers' Day.

So depending on your neighborhood, expect to see children dancing around a maypole. Or else banners, protest signs, and tear gas.

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Colleen Sheehy, an educator and the executive director of Public Art Saint Paul, has called these two divergent May Day traditions "red root" and "green root."

The red root

May Day, the political observance, goes back to the 1886 Chicago Haymarket riots.

A five-day general strike, beginning May 1, climaxed three days later with the deaths of eight policemen and an unknown number of workers. In 1891, May Day was designated an international workers' day.

Workers were supposed to "demonstrate energetically on May 1 for the legal establishment of the 8-hour workday, for the class demands of the proletariat, and for universal peace." So said the Sixth Conference of the Second International, in 1904.

"The industrial revolution created a lot of grievances among working people from the get-go." says Evelyn Hershey, education director for the American Labor Museum, located at the Botto House in Haledon. (Nearby Paterson was  a hub of the American labor movement.)

"May Day was an expression of their solidarity," Hershey says.

By the 1950s, Soviet soldiers were parading through Moscow's Red Square each May 1 to commemorate events that happened in Chicago 60 years before.

"I've been to Moscow, it's very gay," sings a character in Stephen Sondheim's "Follies." "Well anyway, on the first of May." Meanwhile, nervous Americans — in Chicago and elsewhere — did their best to rebrand May 1 as "Americanization Day" or "Loyalty Day." (Our own Labor Day was fixed in September starting in 1894.) May Day is still a thing among leftist groups, in America and elsewhere.

The green root

The other kind of May Day — flowers and maypoles and madrigals — is a lot older.

It probably goes back to ancient Roman festivals. And while much of Europe went in for it during the middle ages, it always had a somewhat disreputable, pagan flavor.

Drinking and carousing were winked at. Maidens went full-on hippie, letting down their hair and bedecking themselves with flowers. The maypole itself, associated with trees, had Druid overtones. Sexual associations too, according to some.

May Day "is celebrating fecundity, the rebirth of the world," says Deborah Powell, a former president of the Bergen County Historical Society. Maypoles are part of the society's "Pinkster" celebration (a Jersey Dutch tradition) on May 20 at the New Bridge Landing historic site in River Edge.

"This is about having a positive attitude, about the good times that are coming," Powell says.

There were other questionable May Day entertainments. Robin Hood, the cheeky outlaw who gamboled in the greenery, was a favorite May Day character in the 15th century. On May Day, there were Robin Hood plays. People dressed up as Robin and his Merry Men. Very likely, we have May Day to thank for the continuing popularity of Robin Hood in books and movies. You might even say that Robin Hood, that pioneer of wealth redistribution, is where the two May Days — political and pastoral — meet.

In America, Puritans were particularly put out by May Day.

"They also set up a May-pole, drinking and dancing about it many days togaether, inviting the Indean women, for their consorts, dancing and frisking togither, (like so many fairies, or furies rather,) and worse practises."  So wrote a scandalized William Bradford, governor of New Plymouth, in 1628, when news reached him of a nearby settlement called Merry Mount. This group of frolicsome colonists, in Quincy Massachusetts, rejected the pious attitudes of their pilgrim neighbors. The chief symbol of their town was a maypole.

Needless to say, the Puritans soon put a stop to it. This incident became the basis for a famous Nathaniel Hawthorne story, "The May-Pole of Merry Mount."

For many years, the chief May Day custom in this country was a kind of reverse Halloween. People would make May Day baskets, fill them with flowers and treats, leave them hanging on a front doorknob, ring the bell, and run away.

This quaint custom can still be found in some pockets of the United States today, according to Linton Weeks of NPR. In the 19th century, it was a much-loved tradition. "Little folks observed May Basket Day custom in hanging pretty baskets to door knobs," a Michigan newspaper wrote in 1886.

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Whatever the customs, the point of May Day remains the same: fertility, flowers, the coming of spring.

No surprise that today's pagans and Wiccans would embrace the holiday (usually under its Gaelic name, Beltane). Or that the writer Anthony Shaffer, creator of the classic 1973 movie thriller "The Wicker Man," would feel free to imagine a colony of modern-day pagans who celebrated May Day in a particularly spirited way — with a human sacrifice.

Speaking of which, the one thing May Day is not about is emergencies.

The familiar "Mayday! Mayday!" we hear in movies, when a plane is about to crash, is actually from the French "m'aidez," meaning "help me!"

Email: beckerman@northjersey.com