Mental Floss

What Is May Day?

And how did a pagan springtime festival become a day for workers’ rights?
ByMichele Debczak|
A crowd of workers gathered at a May Day event in New York City, early 20th century.
A crowd of workers gathered at a May Day event in New York City, early 20th century. | Historical/Corbis/Getty Images (May Day event); Justin Dodd/Mental Floss (background)

Ask the average American to describe May Day, and they might mention a pole wrapped in ribbons and springtime pagan rituals. It’s true that May 1 does have associations with those things in the Northern Hemisphere, but the holiday has held a greater meaning ever since the Second Industrial Revolution at the end of the 19th century. That’s when the International Socialist Conference declared May 1 International Workers’ Day.

  1. The Pagan Origins of May Day
  2. How May Day Became a Rally for Workers’ Rights

The Pagan Origins of May Day

Spring is packed with various holidays and celebratory rituals—there’s the spring equinox, Beltane, and Easter, to name some of the more well-known ones. In some places, May 1 is also a day of springtime festivities. Some believe May Day traces back to the Roman festival of Floralia; others link it to Beltane. Various sources of May Day inspiration, whether Roman, Celtic, or from elsewhere in Europe, link the festivities to fertility, birth, and the start of the spring farming season. People would celebrate by gathering flowers and dancing around the Maypole, a tree or pole with ribbons tied around it.

How May Day Became a Rally for Workers’ Rights

May Day transformed from a day reserved for spring festivals to a communist day of remembrance when U.S. workers took to the streets in Chicago on May 1, 1886. Factory workers were fed up with working up to 16-hour days under dangerous conditions. They went on strike to demand more reasonable workday hours until protests erupted in violence. On May 3, several workers were injured or killed in a clash with police, and the following night a bomb detonated in a crowd of police officers monitoring an assembly in Haymarket Square. Police responded by opening fire at protestors, killing several and injuring 200.

Today, socialists and supporters of workers’ rights commemorate the incident, known as the Haymarket Affair, each year on May 1.

The date’s modern connotations haven’t erased its original significance as an ancient spring festival. Since emerging from pagan traditions, May Day has grown into a secular holiday in Europe, with celebrations including cake, music, and, of course, a dance around the Maypole. Signs of it are easy to miss in the U.S., but in other countries it’s a public holiday that takes the place of Labor Day. Activists around the world often plan marches and protests for the first of May.

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A version of this story originally ran in 2018; it has been updated for 2025.

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