Ah, May Day… it’s a toothpaste, it’s a shoe polish, it’s many holidays in one! Creepy authoritarian types can celebrate Loyalty Day… maybe by volunteering to be interrogated, background checked, and body-cavity-searched by John Ashcroft personally. I feel more secure just thinking about it.

If you’re keen on law and order, or even just Law & Order, but not into the all-out jingoist thing, you can try on a little Law Day instead. I might actually be down with that one this year, what with respect for the rule of law in conspicuously short supply these days.

If that all sounds awfully bourgeois, bust out your holiday red (and/or black) and unite with your fellow working stiffs for the International Labor Holiday.

You may recall the watered-down, Ozzie and Harriet version of the pagan original as simply May Day. Just don’t tell Sen. Santorum that it involves children frolicking around a pole… who knows what that could lead to.

Myself, I’ve always been partial to the classic version: Beltaine. The main event at this fertility rite involves dancing naked around a bonfire en masse, until the Beltaine prom queen and a guy with antlers strapped to his head—representing the maiden goddess and the horned god respectively—copulate frenetically to symbolize the coming of Spring and the impregnation of the earth. Well, either that or this Wiccan girl I dated in college had a weird sense of humor…