May Day represents many things for many people. To children, it is a spring celebration where they dance, wrapping crêpe paper around a maypole; on television, pilots call out "May Day" on their way to a crash landing; in politics, May Day is International Worker's Day; and to James Bond aficionados, May Day will always be the Grace Jones' villain-turned-good gal in the 1985 "A View to a Kill."

The spring May Day festival has a Celtic pagan origin. European settlers brought the spring festival to the American continent. Often, a tall wooden pole probably of Germanic tradition, called a maypole, was erected. The poll may have symbolized the Germanic reference for sacred trees, or may have represented phallic symbolism.In Britain, the Maypole's celebration dates to the mid-14th century, And then began to disappear in the 16th century with the rise of Protestantism. With the coming of the Restoration in the 17th century, may dances around maypoles again became popular. In the 19th century, the maypole dance introduced intertwining ribbons with complicated weaving patterns.In colonial United States, in the new Plymouth colony in 1628, escaped servants set up a maypole and danced about it with the local Native Americans.American schools often have a May Day celebration featuring a dance around the maypole, where from schoolchildren to college students, intertwine crêpe paper ribbons as they celebrate spring by dancing around the maypole."Mayday" is a voiced distress signal. Contrary to the way it sounds, this version of "Mayday" neither refers to the month of May nor its first day. Instead, it derives from a procedure of the early French pilots who were advised to radio, "Venez m'aider," meaning "come help me", with the "m'aider" pronounced "mayday" understandable to the English speakers.May 1, known as May Day, is International Workers' Day, a celebration of the international labor movement and a national holiday in more than 80 countries. During the years following the Russian Revolution, in the United States, May Day became associated with the Socialist party and Communist Russia. Even so, President Eisenhower declared May 1 as Law Day.Labor unions have maintained a connection with this international tradition, and in cities with major union backing, such as New York City, thousands of workers march in May Day parades.In 2006, Latino immigrant groups use May Day for the Great American Boycott, a general strike of undocumented immigrant workers. There was a similar boycott in Los Angeles in 2007, and in 2008 longshoremen use the date to protest against the Iraq war. In recent years the date has been used to protest the Arizona immigrant law, and Occupy Wall Street used the day to protest the growing divide between the rich and the poor.International Workers' Day is generally traced back to the Haymarket Square riots. The Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions unanimously set May 1, 1886, as the date by which the eight-hour work day would become standard.But on May 4, 1886, at Haymarket Square in Chicago, a peaceful rally in support of workers striking for an eight-hour day was disrupted by a bomb blast that resulted in the deaths, injuries and arrests of scores of people, setting back the fight for the eight-hour workday, but leading to the creation of International Worker's Day.And last but not least, Grace Jones played May Day, a flat-coiffed henchwoman of superhuman strength in the 14th James Bond spy flick, "A View to a Kill." This was the seventh and last appearance of Roger Moore as James Bond. The film's title was based on an Ian Fleming short story, "From a View to a Kill," from his "For Your Eyes Only" short story collection. The high-tech computer age plot had little to no resemblance to the original Fleming story.