May Day at Powderhorn Park has been revived, although the experience is changing.

Our Mayday celebration began in 1974, initiated and shepherded by In the Heart of the Beast Theatre (HOBT) as an annual event with broad community participation. For nearly 50 years HOBT enacted the Mayday Parade, the Tree of Life Ceremony, and the Festival in Powderhorn Park. In April 2023, HOBT announced that it would no longer produce Mayday, and “released it” to the community.

Now, in 2025, there is no single organization producing Mayday; the Parade is built by decentralized community groups hosting puppet-making workshops and the Semilla Center for Healing and the Arts is sponsoring an artistic cohort and workshops to create the Tree of Life Ceremony. Festivities in Powderhorn Park following the Parade will be quite different than in HOBT years, with no organized food trucks or large music stages. You are encouraged to bring picnics and enjoy the beautiful park.

I was thrilled to have May Day back, although I wasn't able to attend as much as I usually do--I was in Eden Prairie assisting my mom with some things last Sunday, and so I missed the parade and the Tree of Life ceremony.

I got to the park by about 2:30, and there was still plenty to see that delighted me and reminded me of May Days of yore. This day is always like an explosion of color. I first learned about May Day in the park from an email that a friend sent out years ago. It was simply a stream-of-consciousness description of the sights that could be seen in the park that day, and it intrigued me so much that I decided I had to check out this event.

May Day is flower crowns and bicycles and dreadlocks and Morris dancers. It is a drum circle that pulses out all afternoon into the evening. It is brass instruments, belly dancers, face paint, ribbon skirts, kilts, laughter, and elf ears. It is bared shoulders, swirling capes, and picnics and booths set up around the lake, where the crowd circles along the path, not in any hurry. It is blankets on Blanket Hill, and the call of the horns as the boats row across that lake, bringing the grinning Sun. It is signs with urgent messages, and children in elaborate paper mache costumes pulled by their parents in decorated wagons. Sometimes it snows, and sometimes the sun in the sky overhead roasts everyone. But either way, everyone is having a wonderful time.

It is Beltane. It is the earth coming alive and saying, yes, we are still here. We are a community, and we take care of each other.

I love May Day. I am so happy to see it back.

This week's design is perhaps a bit messy and confusing, but I was trying to capture that explosion of color sensation that May Day always brings.

A collection of images from the Powderhorn May Day festival: a stage with musicians playing is set up in a street, silhouetted against a brilliantly blue sky. Above the stage, paper mache birds surround a giant Benjamin Franklin puppet holding a sign that reads 'Well, Mr. Franklin, have we got a Republic or a Monarchy? A REPUBLIC IF YOU CAN KEEP IT." The May Day Sun puppet is over to the left. Below it is an alebrije, a snail constructed on a bicycle. Center: a woman in a red tulle skirt and wearing a red top hat, holding a saxophone. To the right of the woman is a giant paper mache head with closed eyes. To the right of that, a couple dances in the street to the music of the band, standing in front of deer-like alebrije. Lower center: the fire birds and drums that are part of the boats that traditionally row the Sun across Powderhorn Lake. Lower left corner: the head of a large paper mache rabbit.

May Day



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