Does anyone still fill paper cones with flowers and leave them at the neighbors' door?
We used to make construction paper cones, fill them with daffodils and put them in the neighbor's screen door, ring the door bell and then run away.

I thought it was a great tradition.

Steen told me that in Denmark in the early Spring, they also had a tradition of sending flowers to people anonymously. When he was a kid, his family had good friends in Greenland, so Steen would pick little spring flowers from their yard and mail them with a spring greeting to their friends in Nuuk, Greenland. They probably would have been the only flowers to be found in Greenland in April, even if they were a little wilty.

Since Whangarei, NZ sits at 36 degrees south, people here are not heralding in the summer, but grudgingly going into fall/winter, so May Day is not a big seller here. There are still flowers blooming here in the temperate (sometimes called sub-tropical) climate of northern New Zealand; birds of paradise, hibiscus and roses, and the fall/winter rain showers keep the trees and grasses green year-round. The temperatures are dropping into the upper 40's and 50's... cold by NZ standards, although in the afternoon, if it stops raining and the sun comes out, it quickly becomes 60 to 70 so it's not exactly the crisp air of a Midwestern Autumn. I often get confused about which season we're going into. As the temperature drops, it seems like Christmas should be right around the corner and we start thinking of which Christmas albums to play.

Well, I'm usually a bit confused in general, so the 'backward' seasons don't really make that much difference. Although, the other day we did have the neighbor girl over to make gingerbread-man cookies.

Like my high school gym teacher once said to me, in one of those rhetorical tones of voice ; "Angela, you wake up to a new world every day don't you".

Do I? I hadn't noticed.