May Day

May 1st always brings back lots of memories. When I was growing up it was one of my favorite days of the year. For one thing it was my mom and dad’s anniversary. They were married in 1943. The other part of May 1st that I loved was making May baskets with my mom, filling them with popcorn and candy and then delivering them to all the neighbor’s homes.

Of course, back then I had no idea about International Worker’s Day. For me May 1st meant May poles and ribbons, flowers in your hair and swapping May basket gifts with friends. It was just a really special time with my mom.

We popped popcorn the night before and made the baskets. We used construction paper, paper doilies, ribbons, buttons from the big metal button tin, cups and pipe cleaners. Sometimes we drew pictures on a piece of paper and did this folding thing that created a basket. Mom was a 1st grade teacher so she knew stuff. :-) We put in candy like circus peanuts, ew, jelly beans, candy corn and what were those called…Boston Baked Beans? They had a peanut in the middle and were coated with a candy shell and were bumpy for some reason. We never had what I now consider the good stuff. There were no chocolate bars or M & M’s, but everything we put in the baskets went really well with the popcorn.

Some memories fade and others remain so vivid that it can’t be possible it happened over 55 years ago.