May Baskets

 When I was a kid in the 1970s, May baskets on the first day of May were still a thing. One made them with construction paper---a simple cone with a paper handle taped or stapled to hold the cone, which was then filled with candy treats of various kinds. One left such baskets on the door handles of friends, neighbors, and relatives. This was in the Midwest.

I was thinking about May baskets because they had sprung into my memory, and upon doing so, I realized that it had been many years since I had heard anyone mention them, in person on in the media. May baskets had disappeared from our cultural consciousness.

It is easy to see that such a tradition would not survive the 1980s, which is when so many aspects of culture began disappearing from our shared experience. It is not that such trends began in the 1980s. Rather they typically began by the 1960s. It's that traditions that began dying out in the 1960s still had enough momentum from the living generations of the time to continue for another decade or so.

What I just said is one of the most poignant, vibrant constant experiences of my life---that I was born at a time to see many aspects of life in America and western countries which had existed for decades and centuries, begun to be phased out?

Isn't this always happening? Perhaps, but it was unmistakable that the 1960s saw a massive acceleration in the wiping away of old thins and the replacement with new things. For example, I am somewhat of a freak for foreign language learning, especially small ones spoken only in a localized region, and which are endangered. It is a fact that there are tens of thousands of languages in the world which have been spoken for centuries but which are dying out and which, all things being equal, will not survive a living languages into the 22nd century. This includes even ones in the US which have existed for over a hundred years as niche languages and dialects, but which are severely endangered. There are still people alive who speak this languages natively and fluently, but there is a lower bound on the age of such people. There are no native speakers, or very few, younger than a certain age. This age is almost universally that of people born in the early 1960s.

Children born at that time and later ceased obtaining these languages as living languages. Perhaps they heard it spoken among adults, and they can recognize words and phrases, but they never learned to speak it themselves. It was not necessary for them to do. Universal electrification, and especially the proliferation of television, had reached a point where kid naturally used a larger language, like English, and found the use of their grandparents' tongue to be out of date and old-timey.

As I write this, I am thinking about Missouri French, which I just learned about. But it applies to probably most Native American languages, and a great many 'small languages' of Europe, especially those without status as a national language.

Even official national languages may be in danger. I recently read that Icelandic children typically speak English with each other on the playground, reserving Icelandic when they have to speak to adults. There are only 300,000 people in Iceland. Their language has been spoken in some form or another for a thousand years on that island. Will it be spoken 100 years hence? It feels like a fading dream one remembers upon waking, that one knows one cannot return to. The conditions are no longer in existence.

Are May baskets still a thing anywhere, outside cultural reactionaries who keep alive old traditions in isolation, to the bemusement of their peers. "I know someone who still does it?" doesn't count. That's a symptom of the late stage tail end of a tradition. Will children today care to keep it going, even for nostalgia, or are people my age the last one to remember? That is---is their a community in which May baskets are still a common, expected thing, and is undertaken even by children as a expected holiday event? My guess is no.

Of course I am talking about many, many things beside May baskets. But I can't think of a better example of a tradition, dying out even as I participated in it as a child, and which is apparently dead in common use. 

But at least May Day is still a holiday! A Communist one to be sure, but that goes without saying. All our holidays have been Communist versions of their former selves.