 I'm Ginny Matherall and I'm a fourth generation witch. Today I were looking at part two of my Beltane video celebrations and this is going to concentrate on May Day. For May Eve you need to go back to my previous video which I'll link in the description below for you and watch that although you don't need to have watched that to watch this one because they are slightly separate just two sides of the same coin. So today I am looking at May Day rituals, rites, and traditions that you could follow. So there are two parts to the May Day Festival. There is May Eve which finishes at midnight on May Eve and then there is the May Day and this whole festival we call Beltane. The dark half of the festival is the May Eve and the light half of the festival is May Day and this reflects what's going on in the world at the time because May Day is the start of the light half of the year and it is a very important festival to celebrate. As much as Halloween or Samhain is one of the big Wheel of the Year festivals so is May Day. May Day is such a joyous festival I can't wait to tell you about it. So at the end of my last video we left you at midnight with the wild hunt collecting the souls of the living to take to the other world and you could divine the future from standing in your parish church. May Day the celebrations also start at midnight. Women and men would go out at midnight and gather the Hawthorne, the May blossom, more on that later, as well as all the other flowers and greenery they needed to decorate their houses. They would do this at midnight because it's an auspicious time but also because this is a festival of the sun the sun needs to rise on May Day and see the beautiest decorations of the flowers that you've picked covered in their May Jew which you will need in honour of the sun. This is a festival all about rebirth and life and fertility and so if you were a young lady who wished to keep up her beautiful appearance I thoroughly recommend that you go out before dawn on May morning and ask the dawn breaks. Wash your face in the morning dew as this will ensure your beauty for the rest of the year. The Hawthorne bush is almost May in abundance. It is that white, frothy, beautiful flowers that deck the whole of the UK at this time. It's so creamy and frothy and wonderful. The Hawthorne tree was a major part of this festival. It was one of the sacred trees of the Druid. It is the tree of fertility and fairies so should you be looking to get pregnant one of the most brilliant ways to do so is to take advantage of the sprawl and the energy of the earth and go and make love underneath a Hawthorne tree on May Day and you will find yourself with child quite shortly afterwards I believe. If you conceive a child under the boughs of a Hawthorne tree do note that that child will be beloved by the fame. They will have lips as red as the Hawthorne berries and skin as creamy as the Hawthorne blossom. They'll be a beautiful child indeed. However, once you have entwined in love with your partner be aware not to fall asleep because the Hawthorne tree is also the tree of the fairies because A this will upset the fairies and therefore you won't get pregnant. They will stop that little happening or they might abduct you and taken down to Fairy World and you know left there to do their bidding whatever it is. Normally every minute or something you pass in Fairy World it's seven years or thereabouts in our world. I can't remember they have a different time zone because remember May Day is the time when the veil between the worlds is at its thinnest. Like Sowing was at Halloween May Day is the start of the light half of the year, Sowing is the start of the dark half of the year and both of them have the worlds colliding together. This also includes the worlds of the fairies and that is why you will often see fairies on May Day. Hawthorns are part of a Maying you cannot go a Maying without May and May Day celebrations do include this amazing festival of the Hawthorne tree. May Day is all about the celebration of the light half of the year and so therefore this is a sun festival we are celebrating the sun's ascent into the sky. So you've got up extraordinarily early and you've gathered your blossoms and your greenery covered in your mageou to decorate your homes and your festival area and then what happens you go to the top of the highest hill because you need to see the May Day sun peeking up over the horizon and whereupon it will dance for you. The May Day sun is known to dance in honour of the festival and in honour of the day. There is nothing more wonderful than getting up on a May Day morning and going to the top of the highest hill in your area to watch the sun rise. It is an incredibly old custom that has been practiced throughout the UK since almost it's dawn of time. As you greet the sun it's a great thing to do a spiral dance as much as we were doing spiral dancing up the hill to the top of it on May Eve on May Day you should greet the hun with circular dancing to help connect the circular and spiral energy that's coiling out of the earth as we speak. At San Abbas in Dorset with the giant man which is carved onto the hillside you will find the Morris men of the town dancing at dawn on the giant. It is part of an ancient tradition and nobody knows why apparently apart from us traditional witches who understand that the spiral dance in honour of the sun on May Day morning is our way of celebrating this festival. So after our morning activities it is time to go back down to the village and hold our procession. This is where we celebrate the marriage of the earth and the sky together by the procession of the May Queen a young virginal child on the cusp of womanhood who was chosen to possess around the village surrounded by her bar of flowers and her attendants and there meet the green man or the king of the May and Mary. It's a sweet and charming ceremony I love this I spent a lot of time as a child wanting to be the May Queen I never made it I only ever made her attendant when I was a child but I did enjoy the procession around the village. People would throw flowers at us as we passed because the May Queen brought you luck and it's incredibly important to have that luck bestowed on you for the rest of the year. Once the May Queen has been married to her making this is when we get the May Pole. May Pole dancing of course is all about the connection between the earth and the sky and therefore it is the spiral dance that we're seeing again and people dance around it in a spiral format in order to energize and connect with the sprout that is rising out of the earth. Remember the earth it has had peak sexual activity at the moment and therefore we're connecting with this loving and incredible life force in order to celebrate the time. The May Pole is decorated with a Hawthorn blossom of course this is a May after all. After this phonetic dancing and spinning around the May Pole of course what more could you do apart from take the partner of your choice into the woods. When I certainly was growing up the May Day babies were considered very fortunate it was this very old pagan tradition that if you had a pregnancy developed because of a May Day liaison you were sort of expected to marry the person that you had the liaison with but if you didn't your child was not considered the you know traditional bastard. It was most most strange because this is the early 1970s when having a child out of wedlock was a big deal but not if it was a May Day baby. That's possibly why I love May Day. I did enjoy the May Day festivities when I grew up they were frenetic and exciting and fun. So May Day will draw to a close at dusk and this is when everyone goes home taking with them the flowers from the festival to keep in their homes until they wither to remind them of the beauty of the May Day celebrations. Are you going to do any May Day celebrations? Do you have anything going on in your life that I need to know about? Do let me know. I'm really interested to learn. Otherwise please come and join my coven it's up quite soon go to www.patreon.com forward slash Ginny Metherall for details we're doing some exciting stuff I hope to see you there and otherwise I really need to like and subscribe so that I can keep this channel going because the more subscribers I have the more time I have to make the videos for you and I will see you in a couple of days.