The gay neighborhood thumps with house music. Under normal circumstances, June busts out all over with Pride Month parties and parades. with anyone who might be in cahoots with such a manufacturer.The good news: this year you have time for some movies. "To ward off that calamity, please do not share this. "I harbor a fear that some major company will rediscover May Basket Day and mar its simplicity with commercial baskets, cards and trinkets," she writes in her 2012 memoir, In Her Shoes: Step By Step. Whatever the case, Madonna Dries Christensen, a writer in Florida, is not totally sure she wants the habitual ritual to flourish again. Maybe modern innovation overwhelmed the May basket tradition: A household-hint adviser suggested "May Baskets from plastic bottles" in the Belleville, Kan., Telescope in 1976. Or an increased desire for get-off-my-lawn privacy. So what happened? Maybe the ritual receded because of a national fall from innocence. "Remember May Basket Day?" a syndicated columnist asked in the spring of 1963. Observing May Day traditions on May 1, 1963, an Associated Press reporter in Providence, R.I., wrote that there were only a "few May baskets hanging from door knobs" that year. Though vestiges of the sincere ceremony still pop up on the Internet, the in-real-life event has pretty much evanesced. She points to other reminiscences: Joan Gage in A Rolling Crone remembers making baskets as a child in Milwaukee and leaving them for old folks in the neighborhood, just for the kindness of it.Īnd Old Fashioned Living recalls that Louisa May Alcott wrote about May Basket Day in New England in her 1880 children's book Jack and Jill.įrom Alcott's story: "Such a twanging of bells and rapping of knockers such a scampering of feet in the dark such droll collisions as boys came racing round corners, or girls ran into one another's arms as they crept up and down steps on the sly such laughing, whistling, flying about of flowers and friendly feeling-it was almost a pity that May-day did not come oftener."Įventually, May Basket Day - like the spring flowers arranged in the baskets - began to wilt and droop. The more raucous elements were toned down after the continent became Christianized, but the May pole dance and May baskets survived in a more G-rated form."
Marci Matson, director of the historical society in Edina, Minn., writes: "The practice has a long history, stemming from the European pagan festival of spring, Beltane. Here and there you can find recollections of May Basket Days past. The Indiana, Pa., Gazette reported that first lady Grace Coolidge found her admirers and gave them flowers she had picked. Two bold children hung May baskets on the White House front door on May Day 1925.
Louis Republic reported on in archaicspeak, "it is May Basket Day - when the youthful fancy manifests its turn to thoughts of love by surreptitiously leaving baskets of spring flowers on the stoop appertaining to the home of the one adored." "With the young, in rural communities especially," the St. The Taunton, Mass., Gazette in May 1889 told the story of a young man who got up very early and walked a mile and a half to hang a basket on his sweetheart's door, only to find another basket from another beau already hanging there. Joseph, Mich., the Herald reported on May 6, 1886, "little folks observed May Basket Day custom in hanging pretty baskets to door knobs." The writer went on to say, in the spirit of the times, that if a boy hangs a May basket on a girl's door and the girl catches him, "it's a great disgrace." If a girl is the hanger, "it disgraces the boy again not to catch her."