The way May Day has changed

    I think we missed the celebrations of May Day this year. No dancing around the May pole; no baskets of flowers and candy left anonymously at the front door; no military parades in Red Square.
    When I was really young, we celebrated May Day at school. The school year was drawing to a close and, looking back, I realize the teachers were looking for a good excuse to get everyone out doors and out of the classroom.
    Among the regular ceremonies was this May pole thing where everyone held a ribbon attached to the top of a tall pole. With every other person going clockwise or counterclockwise, and alternately ducking under and over, the ribbons all wove themselves into an attractive pattern down the pole. We never quite got it right, but we came close enough to see how it was supposed to work.
    I'm not sure any schools still practice this ritual. I suppose someone eventually realized that the May pole dance had pagan roots and was inappropriate for school children.
    The same is probably true of the quaint practice of distributing May baskets to your friends. Handmade little cones of colored construction paper, decorated with cut out flowers, filled with candy and maybe a fresh bloom or two. You'd hang the basket on the front door handle, then ring the door bell and scamper away giggling. I'm sure kids today are way too sophisticated for that.
    We were beginning to gain sophistication in some unpleasant ways in the late 1950s. The city took an old wooden tower from the deserted air base south of town and moved it to the highest hill in town. Fathers and sons attended meetings to discuss civil defense and signed up to take turns sitting up in the tower, scanning the sky for mysterious aircraft -- not UFOs, but military planes probably from Russia.
    There was a chart on the wall with the silhouette of all American aircraft. We were to report immediately anything we saw in the sky that didn't look right. I'm sure we never saw anything to report, and I'm pretty sure that no one else did either.
    By the time I was in eighth grade, May Day became the time we watched the nightly news and saw hundreds of Russian soldiers and hundreds of Russian tanks parading through the center of Moscow in a celebration of military strength.
    It's a little hard to realize now how threatening those images were. The Soviet Union isn't as scary as it was then. It was, after all, the middle of the Cold War.
    We lived under the constant threat of nuclear attack. At least, we thought we were constantly in danger. We had drills similar to fire drills where we practiced how to huddle under desks or in hallways to prepare for blasts. Every town had a designated civil defense headquarters where food and water were stored for the long wait that would be required before it was safe to come out.
    Bomb shelters in back yards were something we'd heard of, or seen on TV, but I can't remember anyone in my hometown building one. If they did, they called it a tornado shelter, which seemed a little more sensible.
    We always thought we were a little safer, being out in the middle of nowhere. Then we heard about the missle silos that were supposedly scattered all across the midwest. That would make us a prime target. We were scared again.
    As a community service project, my eighth grade class decided to distribute nucleat preparedness information to everyone in town. And I actually do mean everyone.
    We ordered wallet-sized cards that gave detailed instructions about what to do in case of nuclear attack. I wish I still had one. We organized teams and took one to every single house in town.
    In the middle of distributing those cards, the threat became more tangible somehow.
    The next fall we sat nervously through classes waiting for the next development in the Cuban missle crisis.
    Then came assissanations, riots and eventually the fall of the Soviet Union.
    I liked the pagan May Day better I think...