May 1 – May Day has come and gone, but the animosity that accompanied this year’s annual May Day celebration at the St. Mary’s College of Maryland in St. Mary’s City lives on. It seems that this once private student ritual of parading naked through campus has become quite a public spectacle.

The tradition of letting off steam just before finals was a well-kept secret for many years. However, a few years ago, a radio station announced the naked parade and the media coverage of this event has been growing each year.

This year, students decided to fight back. They covered their vehicles with obscene signs, threw things at the people with cameras in attendance, and made universally recognized obscene hand gestures on more than one occasion – anything to render video and pictures unusable by the media.

Of course, through the miracles of modern video and photography software, the effort did not deter the media, but it did create a great deal of ill-will between students and media covering the news event.

Getting naked and celebrating in public are not new occurrences by any stretch of the imagination. The first day of May has been a time for celebrating pagan ritual – raucous and otherwise – since before Christianity.

Research on Wikipedia indicated that May Day is a day for celebration in many cultures around the world.
The holiday, celebrated almost exclusively in the Northern Hemisphere, dates back to pre-Christian Europe. Celebrations such as the Celtic Beltane or the Germanic Walpurgis Night celebrated the coming of summer on May 1.

As Christianity took hold, these celebrations were banned altogether or Christianized and converted to celebrations of love and Christianity.

That however did not stop certain pagan rituals. Over the years, May Day has become a day of political protest and some neo-pagan groups have revived some of the old traditions celebrating the day as a pagan religious festival. In Oxford, revelers gather below Magdalen College tower to listen to the college's choir and then some students to jump off Magdalen Bridge in the Cherwell River.

In Cornwall, students have their annual Obby-Oss day of festivities – believed to be one of the oldest fertility rites in the UK. Citizens dance through the streets of the town with accordion players and sing the May Day song. The whole town is decorated with springtime greenery, and every year thousands of onlookers attend.

St. Andrews in Scotland has a celebration whereby students gather on the beach late on April 30 and dive into the North Sea at sunrise on May 1, some naked, but all in attendance, participants and watchers alike – enjoy the annual celebration.

It would seem that the only way students at St. Mary’s College of Maryland can put an end to the growing media coverage is to stop the celebration altogether, which leads this reporter to wonder if instead they should embrace the event and the coverage and celebrate as do so many others around the world.

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