Mayday! Mayday! I may need some help extracting enough material from my noggin’ to write this important piece of literature about what May means to me. When initially pondering the fifth month of the year, my mind instantly honed in on the actual word may – not the month of May. Numerous Irish toasts begin with the word may such as “may the wind always be at your back” and “may the most you wish for be the least you get.” And there are so many well-known expressions with that tiny but significant word in them like “let the chips fall where they may,” “devil-may-care,” “may the best man win,” “come what may,” “be that as it may,” and “may the force be with you.”

Whoa! Writing “may the force be with you” jogged my memory enough to remember a very special day for sci-fi nerds which just so happens to be during the month I’m currently jibber jabbering about. May The 4th Be With You (aka Star Wars Day) is a clever take on the Star Wars catchphrase that many businesses now annually exploit to increase their sales. God bless capitalism. Supposedly, you can either be a Star Wars fan or a Star Trek fan, but you can’t be both. I don’t make the rules, and I’m certainly not about to weigh in on such a controversial subject.

All one has to do is turn over their daily flip calendar to see that the exploitation continues the very next day as we are suppose to celebrate Cinco de Mayo. Again, God bless capitalism. Truth be told, this is the one day of the year I identify as Mexican. My lovely wife is very fond of Mexican cuisine (me not so much) and we both likey margaritas. So, on May 5th we typically try to grace some Mexican joint with our presence.

If I may digress, now being present in the moment, I do recall many a May 1st, as a child growing up in the Midwest. May 1st is recognized as May Day on our calendars, but us Iowans called it May Basket Day. I would describe the glorious event as a reverse Halloween/hide-and-seek combo. Instead of us kids having to go door-to-door begging for candy, the candy came to us. And no costume was needed. The goodies would begin to arrive (placed in – you guessed it – baskets) about an hour after school let out. The homemade “baskets” were commonly fashioned out of construction paper, or either Styrofoam coffee cups or Dixie cups with vibrant designs (my favorite) and sometimes attached with colorful pipe cleaners for handles.

After a basket of treats was left on the front steps and the doorbell rang, the recipient of the goodies was to seek out the deliverer. Busted! A result of a few scrapes and bruises was always a possibility, from chasing the May basket giver around trees and through bushes, but the exhilarating pursuit was usually well worth it. The amount of candy received on May Basket Day was only a miniscule fraction of the haul I would ultimately take in on Beggars’ Night. In fact, sometimes you’d only get a piece or two of candy while the rest of the basket contained stale popcorn as a filler. Not cool.

Not cool may be what some of you are thinking about me, for not mentioning Mother’s Day or Memorial Day until now. I would like to say I immediately thought of both those days when considering the month of May, but that would be disingenuous. Rest assured though Mother’s Day and Memorial Day will be celebrated. Maybe these two special days aren’t at the forefront of my mind because I think mothers and those we have lost should be thought of all year long – not just when the calendar tells us to. I don’t need no stinkin’ calendar telling me what to do. So, this is what May means to me. What does May mean to you?