Female Bonding in the Olden Days

When I was a girl, May Day was special in my home town. Teachers rustled up all their vases out of the closet, because they were gonna have a deskful. Even the BOYS brought some. But after school was a woman/girl celebration that I now know was celebrated in some towns and not others. In my town, on May Day, the girls made construction paper baskets, filled them with flowers, and hung them on the doors of the women they most admired. It might be a teacher, a friend of the family, a grandmother. We knocked or rang the doorbell. Then we ran like crazy to hide on the side of the house out of sight. The door would open. A woman's voice would murmer, "Oh! How pretty!." Then she would call out, "Thank you." And the door would close. Sometimes no one was home, but the woman honored always managed to work her delight over the surprise bouquet into the next day's conversation.

May Day bouquets weren't just about living where the flowers bloom. I have met women from the Midwest aware of the custom, and women from the South who aren't. I don't know when the custom died out, but it's been a long time, I think, since a young girl slipped a small basket of posies on the door of a woman she admires and rang the bell. Shame about that. I think it was a rather special female bonding gesture.

Mother would pick up me and my best friend from school and we would go home to work on the baskets. It's not that we had legions of women we wanted to give them to (for which my mother undoubtedly gave thanks and probably guidance in that direction), but there were usually four or five. Or six. The baskets were easy--cut a strip off one end of the paper for a handle, and roll the remaining paper into a cone and glue it. Glue on the handle. While the glue dried, we picked the flowers and put them in a 3-lb. coffee can with a little water. Then we transferred the whole mess to the back seat of the car so Mother could drive us to each designated house (being a small town, everyone knew where everyone lived) and we could fix up our fresh bouquets as we went. She would park around the corner or down the block so our car wasn't spotted. Sometimes we reconnoitered the bushes around the house for hiding places to duck in when the getaway would take too long. Fun stuff.

I don't remember doing it much after oh, say seventh grade. That became baby stuff for the younger girls to do. But the women never tired of the bouquets, often saving wilted, bedraggled specimens in vases and glasses for days. One teacher received six one year. She was so overwhelmed she almost cried. It WAS a big deal. We girls were telling these women, "You are someone I like. I respect you. And I would like to grow up to be something like you." That was quite an accolade.

Funny thing about that. My mother was an extremely popular teacher. Kids loved her. But in all those times of her lugging Sarah and me around, I don't remember whether there were bouquets on our door when we got back home. There must have been. But I really didn't notice.