Happy May Day!

May 1, 2007!


It's May Day.


For me, growing up in Kansas, May Day meant you went to your garden and cut flowers, put them in a small basket, like the old green plastic baskets that strawberries come in, or we would take a piece of construction paper and roll it like a cornucopia and slide the flowers down in.

Then we would take them to the neighbors home. Sometimes we would leave them on the step, ring the doorbell and run, sometimes we would hand our neighbors the bouquet of flowers.
It was partly a way to be neighborly and partly a way to brag about your garden and all the flowers you planted in the fall.

When we moved to Nebraska that tradition ended, mostly due to the longer winters and not having many flowers to cut and share. Instead, the kids traded bags of candy with the other neighbor kids and had fun trying to leave the candy, ring the doorbell and run without getting caught.
If my kids were writing this reflection, they would say it was more important for them to get candy and be able to catch the neighbors as they left it on our porch and had a long way to run to reach the end of our driveway.

Now we are here in Oregon, and I don't know what to expect. I told the kids Happy May Day this morning and they remembered... asking...
Do you think the neighbors will give us candy?

I think on the way home from work I should stop by the local hardware store and pick up some flowers for my neighbors, because I didn't plant very many last fall.

Maybe next year I will have flowers I can cut and share with my neighbors.