The ancient Saxons and Celts celebrated Mayday. Mayday started off as
a pagan holy day celebrated on May 1st and was called Beltane, the
day of fire. Bel was the Celtic sun god. The holiday was celebrated
by the common folk and it was tied in with the hunt and the goddess
Diana. Later, it began to gravitate more toward becoming a farming
festival and in the Middle Ages, and took on a fertility vein. Guilds
would join in the Mayday celebration and used the event to give their
crafts some publicity.

Since it was a pagan festival and tied in with the common folk, the
Church tried to steer the May 1 holiday toward more of a religious
day and Mayday became affiliated with the adoration of Mary in
Catholic countries. The idea was to convert the thinking from a
pagan “Mayqueen” to Mary the “Queen of heaven”.

In the 16th century, the Maypole tradition appeared in Bavaria. Young
men and women would dance around the pole entwining ribbons and
“hoping to entrap” a lover in the ribbons. Again, there was this link
to fertility!

When labor began to formally organize in the 19th century, they
looked to May 1 as the appropriate day to celebrate labor movements,
probably because of the tie-in between modern unions and the old
guild celebrations. A tragic 1886 labor riot in the US, ending in
many deaths, forever linking the US Mayday celebrations with
“anarchists”. Because of this tragic US labor riot, foreign labor
movements seized on the May 1st day as a formal labor day and the
day eventually became affiliated with international communism.

As a result of the anarchist label and the link to socialism, etc.,
the US began to change labor day celebrations over to early
September. Some states had previously specified May 1 as Labor Day.

During the US anti-Communist movements of the late 1940s, May 1st was
renamed “Loyalty Day” to further distance it from the European Mayday celebrations, especially when these celebrations were marred by labor
riots. The [US] loyalty day concept faded away during the Vietnam
War era

My own link to Mayday is several old family photographs from the early
1900s. One is of my mother-in-law as a little girl dressed up in a
Mayday dress for a Maypole celebration in NYC and my mother as a teen
in a special dress for a church celebration of Mary. Also, a photo of
my sister in a Mayday dress from the late ‘40s but I do not remember
the event. I suspect that these types of celebrations pretty much
vanished right after WWII. I do not recall any kind of May 1st
festivities from my childhood.