A "Rood" is the Cross -- it's the old English word. It's also the feast of Saint Philip and Saint James, Apostles; and the feast of Saint Walpurga, an missionary to the tribes of Northern Europe. All on May the first, of course.

I got an invitation to a May first barbecue yesterday, and offered to bring the Maypole. When he sent out the e-mail invitation to our other co-workers, the host had put in the email "Pamela says she'll bring a May-pole, and I'll provide a diorama of Karl Marx. Obviously we have very different views on what May-Day is!"

May first is also international workers day, and my friend is our token socialist, you see!

If you look up "Roodmas" on a search engine, you'll probably find a lot of sites that say something like "Christians replace the May pole, a traditional Pagan symbol of life, with the 'rood', or cross, a symbol of death." I find myself bridling at that re-interpretation of Christian symbology. The cross is for us the symbol of life's victory over death, of death's defeat, of life everlasting. And deep in the back of my mind is the suspicion that the author of the word I paraphrased knows that full well, and is spinning their documentary as a form of intentional propaganda countering the idiotic websites that fundamentalist sites post about the evils of Hallowe'en and easter bunnies.

The fact of the matter is, that no-one knows for sure what traditional Pagan symbols were, or what feasts ancient Pagans celebrated. Christianity was established throughout Europe for the better part of two thousand years, and was so pervasive that no non-Christian cultures survived intact. What did survive, were nominally Christian feast-days, and folk-customs of isolated (but at least nominally Christian) villages and settlements, that showed a peculiar symmetry unrelated to core Christian doctrine. It's from those nominally Christian practices that cultural anthropologists constructed theories of what pagan practices might have been. Modern Pagan practice is in turn reconstructed from those theories. And at least some of those theories hold that the May-pole is not so much a symbol of life in the generic as of life in the male procreative sense, if you get my phallic drift.

I happen to agree that it's likely that the quarter-day and cross-quarter-day celebrations are syncretistically rooted in pre-Christian customs. So I don't usually argue with Pagans on various debate boards -- and certainly not with Pagans on their own boards -- when they complain about how we "stole" or "co-opted" their holidays from them. But being myself fond of historical fact (and in an obsessive-compulsive mood), I find I just have to point out that to an equal degree, *they* got their holidays from *us*.

Fortunately for all of us, no-one can own a day. So this Saturday, we're going to put up a tall narrow cross in the front yard (made of a piece of thick dowel with a small cross-piece near the top, set in the stand for a yard-umbrella), tie multi-coloured ribbons to the cross-bar, and dance around it. Our dance will celebrate the gift of everlasting life, which we have in the cross. And anyone who wants to dance with us can celebrate life in whatever context they want to celebrate it.