May day

We have had both sunshine and rain today, as is appropriate for May Day, heralding the end of Spring and the beginnings of Summer.  I have been remembering traditions I took part in when I was small - even when not so small: I washed my face in the May Day dawn dew in Edinburgh until I married and left home.  One of these women pictured here could have been me as I did go up Arthur's Seat a couple of my years at university to complete the ritual (I wasn't there then - 1965 was my first year at university, so that May I would still have been at school).  Those were the days before we thought about acid rain and other general pollutants!

I was only in Greece for one May Day that I remember - it must have been in the early 1950s.  A group of aunts took me out to the country the day before in order to gather wild flowers and branches of flowering shrubs which we then wove into a wreath to hang on the balcony.  The wreath then stayed there until Midsummer.  It certainly was not as professional looking as the one illustrated above from here.