Morris dancers have been part of the pagan celebration of May Morning for centuries, and my husband is no exception. When I realized that on every First of May he rose before dawn to join others to dance and sing by the Charles River, and that he was adamant about the importance of this, rain or shine, workday or sleep-in day, I accepted it as an adorable quirk I would never share.

Eventually I tried it though, and found it not without charm. In Boston, there are 100-200 celebrants, depending on the weather, with Morris and English country dancing, songbooks to share, and multiple vigorous Maypole weavings, all at three stands. A group of Harvard students in evening wear dance and drink champagne on the Weeks Footbridge, after which they form rows through which we pass, shaking their hands, wishing each other Merrie May!

I surmise the Young Masters get good luck by shaking hands with the chimney-sweep-equivalent dancers.

Some time after our kids arrived, we realized that most of our family’s recurring traditions revolved around gathering with our extended mostly-English-based folklore family. On May Day we celebrate the end of winter to ensure fertile crops, cows, ewes, and wives.  Dancing and feasting at Easter is based on a pagan tradition of the sun dying and rising again. There is a harvest festival in the fall, Wassail in early December, a Morris Ale over Memorial Day.

Here in California, these European-based rituals are tiny echoes of what we knew on the Left Coast. Celebrating the no-frills, skeletal version of a “proper” May Morning leaves me a little sad, although the people are very nice, and just as committed to their own version.

It’s sort of like Christmas in Hawaii: Familiar yet strange, with a whiff of adaptation.

Big picture: This as one of the things we’ve traded for a slower-paced life in an oceanside town with no snow. Worth it.