Blessed Beltane
A look at the history and traditions of May Day
I don’t have many favorite things. I don’t have a favorite color or flower. I don’t have a favorite musician or movie or ice cream flavor. My favored things change with my mood. But if I really had to choose, I admit I do have a favorite type of rose. Bred in France prior to 1880s and sometimes called the “Sweetheart rose,” the Cécile Brünner is a rambling tea rose that has been popular since Victorian times for its perfect, abundant blooms of softest pink. The Cécile Brünner rose bush that grew alongside our house when I was little was so big it reached the roof. My father used to tell me it was one hundred years old. I could climb into it like a jungle cave to reach the wooden root at the center, so large it made a tiny throne for me to reign over the newts and frogs I would find in the damp area beneath. One of my fondest memories, is watching my angelic mother harvesting basketfuls of tiny rose buds just at the moment their sweet pink petals kissed the air, and stringing them into long, aromatic garlands. When we moved, my parents brought a cutting of that bush along with us. And when they moved a second time, to home they live in now, leaving that property to be razed and rebuilt, I notice the new homeowners still have the Cécile Brünner rose growing in the front yard. As do my parents, and it is in full bloom.
Aria, 2008
The roses blooming coincides perfectly with one of our most beloved celebrations, our school’s May Day Festival. May Day, also called Beltane, is celebrated the night prior and the day of May first, marking the halfway point between the Spring Equinox, Ostara, and the Summer Solstice, Litha. Iron age Celts celebrated this time as spring at its peak, with summer coming ever closer. Because Waldorf curriculum is woven so closely with the natural world, May Day is a joyful way to recognize the changing season and lengthening of the daylight. Of course, traditional festivities surrounding Beltane are a bit different from those we celebrate at our school. May Day in general is not extremely popular in the U.S., probably because a festival in which children dance around a phallic symbol doesn’t go over well with the more puritanical aspects of American culture. Some folks leave posies or May baskets full of goodies on the doorstep of a friend, crush, or loved one, but it is much less common than it was even fifty years ago. At our school, the festival is usually also our “Grandparents Day,” so families are encouraged to come enjoy the festivities together, making flower crowns, watching the classes dance their practiced dances around the May pole, and eating shortbread with strawberries and whipped cream. Children sit calmly with their classes, crowned regally in rainbows of flowers they wove carefully into braided raffia, awaiting their turns to dance, while families spread on out on blankets under shade tents. Younger siblings toddle around while extended families become acquainted. It is always an absolutely beautiful day.
Alako, May Day, 2016
One year, when my little brother (who is twelve years my junior) was still a student there, someone asked me to be the Lady Spring. Unsure what this might entail but willing to help based on the title alone, I made a garland of Cécile Brünner rosebuds into a crown and put on my bright blue maxi-dress. It happened to be a rather gloomy day, but the task required of me ended up being very simple: sit on the thrown decorated in flowers and look like a regal spring goddess. I did my very best. And apparently my best was quite enough, because a miniscule young gentleman wearing a very cute sweater looked at me with such enamored awe that I might have sprouted golden fairy wings. Just as raindrops started to dot the blacktop, he rushed over to me, took my hand and guided me protectively out of the rain and under the shade structure. It was unforgettably charming. The funniest part of the entire experience was enrolling my children there years later and being remembered by some of the teachers for my brief moment of glory as Lady Spring.
To this day, Beltane remains one of my favorite holidays, although I have to admit that I never quite get to celebrate the way I intend to. My ancestry is predominantly Irish/English on my mother’s side and entirely Italian on my father’s side, my mother’s side having immigrated to the U.S. in the mid-1800s and my Italian great-grandparents arriving at the very beginning of the last century, around 1913. Like many Americans with European ancestry, I do not have much if any connection to my cultural roots in either of those places. As I have gotten older, and learned more, I am more wary than ever of cultural appropriation and the way people with little connection to their own cultural traditions tend to cherry pick from others. And in shedding some of those practices that didn’t actually “belong” to me spiritually, such as cleansing spaces with white sage smoke, I continued to seek some kind of spiritual connection to my ancestry. In so doing I have found myself most intuitively drawn to the seasonal celebrations of the ancient Celts, of which there are eight sabbats. Two mark the winter and summer solstices, two the spring and autumnal equinox. The other four are the midpoints between those dates. Not being one to pay very close attention to what day it is, I tend the miss most of them. But Beltane is different in that I find it quite easy to remember.
Ailey, May Day 2020
For Ancient Celts, Beltane was a fire festival celebrated the evening before and day of the first of May, in honor of passions that mark peak of springtime and the imminence and vitality of summer. It was a festival to honor fertility, fire representing the spark that signifies the sacred union that creates life. Beltane loosely translates to the, “Fires of Bel,” for the Celtic deity representing the sun, Belenus. Two huge bonfires would be lit, each one a symbol of fruitfulness and cleansing. Members of the community might walk around the fires, jump over them, or drive their cattle between the two, all aimed at ritual purification. Community members might all put out the hearth fires in their own home, waiting for them all to be re-lit by a common torch, symbolizing a sacred bond between all members of the community. Many participated in courtship rituals around this time. When the Romans took over the British Isles, they brought with them their celebration Floralia, a seven-day celebration from April 20-May 2, involving flowers and revelry, devoted to the goddess of spring, Flora. Floralia, like Beltane, was a holiday with a pleasure-seeking atmosphere, also involving naked public dancing and sexual revelry. Attendees would wear bright clothing, as opposed to the more traditional white, and would weave roses into crowns. Those traditions combined with those of Beltane, giving us the flower-filled, rainbow-ribboned festivity, we know and love today.
Aria and Gryffin, May, 2020
This year, parents are not allowed to attend the event. It is Ailey’s first time dancing around the May pole, and Alako’s third, and I won’t be able to see it. The entire school year has been like that and at first it was a very hard pill to swallow but now I have reached the point that I am just glad they get to participate in it because it really isn’t about me. It’s about their experience, weaving around each other to create a glorious ribbon braid and eating strawberry shortbread in the sunshine. Of course, I will still be donating flowers and strawberries and trying to sneak a picture of them, but I will miss helping all those little fingers shove flower stems into braided raffia and seeing an entire school of sweet students crowned in flowers and beaming. So today we are making flower crowns at home! And tomorrow, the night before Beltane this year, Adam and I are attending and volunteering at a charity event for the school. So that will be the closest we get to a raucous and sexy Beltane. I am positive there will be no naked dancing OR bonfires. But you’d better believe I am making myself a crown of roses.
