Welcome be thou, faire, fresshe May.
~ Geoffrey Chaucer

It’s May—just barely. It’s the last couple of days of the month, and I’m getting this post out a bit late. Nothing like the last minute! But I’ve had a lot going on, and it’s been busy.

May is probably my second favorite month of the year. The weather has been chilly and rainy this year—except for the days I’ve been working in the hospital from sunup to sundown, of course, when many of those days have been sunny and warm. Still, everything is fully leafed out, lush, and green.

Flowers decorate the landscape in bright palettes of pink, pale lavender, and creamy white. Soft clusters of lilacs and snowball viburnum bloom along driveways and walkways, and the roses by the river are just beginning to open their blushing buds. I love driving along one particular stretch of road where a huge feral wisteria grows wild in a wooded area, its cascades of pale purple flowers reaching toward the road. It seems to stretch on forever into the woods. Spring brings such a dramatic change to the landscape that it’s hard to believe we were encased in ice and snow just three short months ago.

As every month does, May brings with it a few unusual celebration days.

We’ve got National Coconut Cream Pie Day on May 8.
A day celebrating the amazing yumminess of creamy coconut custard nestled in a flaky pastry crust and topped with a soft cloud of whipped cream and toasted coconut. As desserts go, you really can’t go wrong with this one—unless you don’t like coconut.

Why do we have a holiday celebrating this particular confectionary wonder? Because someone needed to settle a debt.

In 1895, a flour miller named Franklin Baker of Philadelphia received a shipment of coconuts from Cuba as payment for money owed to him. He figured out a way to shred and dry the coconuts, then built a factory to make the product accessible to everyone. Soon after, recipes for coconut cream pie began appearing in cookbooks.

And that’s basically how coconut cream pie earned its own holiday.

National Limerick Day is celebrated on May 12. 
Who doesn’t love a good limerick? (No, not those limericks!).
The holiday is celebrated on the birthday of English artist, poet, and obvious limerick enthusiast Edward Lear. He popularized the form in his 1846 Book of Nonsense.

A limerick is a humorous, nonsensical five-line poem that follows a rhythm called anapestic trimeter. Basically, the first two lines rhyme with the fifth line, and the third and fourth rhyme with each other.

Here’s a gem from Edward Lear’s Book of Nonsense:

There was an old man of West Dumpet,
Who possessed a large nose like a trumpet;
When he blew it aloud, 
it astonished the crowd,
And was heard through the whole of West Dumpet.

And lastly…

National Twilight Zone Day, celebrated on May 11.
Created by Rod Serling, The Twilight Zone premiered in October 1, 1959. The show was instantly popular, taking viewers on a journey into the fifth dimension with stories full of creepy twists and turns.

I remember watching the Twilight Zone marathons as a kid that aired on Independence Day and New Year’s Day.

The episode that still gives me chills is the one where an advanced race of extraterrestrials called the Kanamits come to Earth seemingly with good intentions, offering easy solutions and advanced technology to solve many of Earth’s problems. All of their plans are neatly written in a book called To Serve Man, which is rather inconveniently published in the Kanamit language.

In an act of apparent goodwill, the aliens invite a group of humans to visit their planet. The story ends with a frantic warning to the protagonist, Michael Chambers, not to board the ship. The book has finally been decoded, and To Serve Man turns out to be… a cookbook.

Unfortunately for Michael, the warning comes too late. The Kanamits were not as committed to helping humanity— as they were to eat it. The ominous last line proclaimed that one day we would all be on the menu. It’s one of the most memorable and unsettling twists in The Twilight Zone series and is one of the most popular episodes.

Creepy and weird! But also awesome in its total creepiness.

So that’s May in a nutshell. From my perspective anyway.

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