The May Day Emoji Guide: Valborg, Beltane, Workers' Day, and the Muguet

Pick a country at random and ask what is happening on May 1. The answers will not match. In Stockholm, a bonfire on a hill at dusk and a choir nobody told to start. In Paris, a sea of red flags and an arrest count that the unions and the police will publicly disagree about. In Lyon, a single white sprig of lily of the valley you are legally allowed to sell on the sidewalk for one day a year. In Honolulu, a plumeria lei. In Edinburgh, a fire procession led by a green man. The same date, eight or so wildly different vibes, and an emoji palette per country that almost nobody outside that country recognizes.

This is the field guide to the first week of May, the densest cluster of unrelated holidays in the calendar. The spine is International Workers’ Day, the version most of the world inherited from the Haymarket affair in 1886. Stacked on top of it are an 8th-century saint, a Celtic cattle festival, a French king’s gift habit, a Hawaiian poet from Oklahoma, a Japanese carp legend, and the day Wageningen agreed to a German surrender in 1945. Each of them gets a section below, with the emojis people actually use, the words they actually say, and a few lines of editorial context for the ones you do not already know.

Why one date hosts eight celebrations

The cluster is not a coincidence. May 1 sits exactly halfway between the spring equinox and the summer solstice, what astronomers call a cross-quarter day. Pre-Christian Europe used those four hinge points (Imbolc, Beltane, Lughnasadh, Samhain) to break the year into farming halves: cattle out to pasture in May, cattle in for winter at Halloween. The Catholic calendar later anchored a saint’s feast on April 30 (Walpurga), in the way it tended to slot saints over older festivals it did not want to argue with.

Then, in 1889, the Second International met in Paris and picked May 1 as the date for a global strike commemorating the Haymarket dead. The strike happened on May 1, 1890, and the date stuck. Workers’ Day landed on top of a thousand-year-old pagan-and-Catholic spring layer cake, and the United States, awkwardly, moved its own labor holiday to September to avoid the association. Everyone else in the world inherited the original.

The fist, the rose, the red flag

Workers’ Day brought three symbols into the modern emoji keyboard with very specific provenance. The ✊ raised fist, the 🌹 red rose, and the 🚩 red flag are not interchangeable. They come from different decades, different countries, and different fights, and they read differently on a 2026 protest sign.

The ✊ raised fist was added to Unicode 6.0 in 2010, but its symbolism predates the platform by a century. The clenched fist appears in trade-union iconography by the 1910s, partly thanks to Big Bill Haywood, a founder of the Industrial Workers of the World, who used the fist metaphor in a 1913 Paterson silk-strike speech: a fist is more than the sum of its fingers. It picked up a second life as Black Power iconography in the 1960s and 70s, and a third as a core Black Lives Matter symbol in the 2010s. On May 1 it tends to read as the original meaning, labor, but the other readings live on the same glyph.

The 🌹 red rose is older as a socialist symbol than as a romantic one in this context. Following the French Revolution of 1848, members of the provisional government wore a red rosette as a sign of rallying. When Bismarck’s 1878 Anti-Socialist laws banned Social Democratic Party emblems in Germany, members substituted red rosebuds in their lapels as a workaround, which German exiles then carried across Europe. The Parti Socialiste in France adopted a stylized fist-and-rose emblem in 1971, drawn by graphic artist Marc Bonnet two years earlier. The British Labour Party replaced its red flag with the rose in the late 1980s. The single 🌹 in your Twitter bio in 2026 is doing some quiet socialist signalling whether you knew it or not.

The 🚩 red flag goes back further still, to the Paris Commune of 1871 when communards flew it over the city as the flag of their short-lived government. Unicode added the generic red flag in 2010, but the ⚒️ hammer and pick (and its older cousin U+262D ☭ HAMMER AND SICKLE, added in Unicode 1.1 in 1993) carry the more specific Marxist freight. The hammer and sickle was designed by Yevgeny Kamzolkin in 1918 for May Day decorations in Moscow’s Zamoskvorechye District, then formally adopted by the Soviet Central Executive Committee in July 1923. Most platforms still render ☭ as black-and-white text, not color emoji, because Unicode never recommended it for emoji presentation.

Quick reference, the working class palette:

Search trends across six countries

Pull up Google Trends for late April and the chart looks like a heart monitor: every May Day-adjacent search term in the world spikes inside a six-day window, then collapses. The thing the chart shows that the headlines miss is which month each celebration peaks in. Sweden’s Valborg searches peak in April (people Google before the bonfire). The French muguet, Latin American día del trabajador, Japanese こどもの日, and global “may day” searches all peak in May, after the date has happened, when people are looking up what they just saw.

Two patterns to notice. First, the 2025 spike for “may day” hit 100, the highest in the five-year window, almost certainly a side effect of the 2025 May Day protests being the largest international labor mobilization in years (over 260 marches in France alone, per The Local). Second, “may day” searches have been quietly climbing in late 2025 and 2026, partly because the distress call “mayday” has been doing more work in news cycles, and Google does not separate the holiday from the radio call.

Valborg and Walpurgisnacht (Sweden, Germany, Czech)

On the night of April 30, much of northern Europe lights a fire and stands very close to it. In Sweden, the holiday is called Valborg, in Germany Walpurgisnacht, in Czech and Slovak Pálení čarodějnic (literally “the burning of the witches”), and in Finland Vappu. The patron saint is Walpurga, an 8th-century English missionary who ended up running a German monastery, was canonized on May 1, and got her feast bolted onto the existing pagan spring fire night.

The Swedish version is the most public. Bonfires (majbrasor or kasar) have been lit since at least the early 1700s, originally to scare away predators from cattle being released to summer pasture. Today the fires are organized by neighbourhood associations, the spring choirs sing, and most students at Uppsala and Lund use it as the official excuse to get extremely drunk in a public park before noon. The Swedish royal family attends a public ceremony every year. The 🇸🇪 cultural memory of Valborg is overwhelmingly positive in a way it is not in Germany.

The German version is darker because Goethe got to it first. In Faust, published in 1808, Mephistopheles takes Faust to a witches’ sabbath on the Brocken peak in the Harz mountains on the night of April 30, complete with naked dancing, the devil presiding, and a series of unsettling visions. Goethe’s Walpurgisnacht is the cultural template for most modern witch imagery in central Europe, including the heavy-metal version. The 🧙‍♀️ witch emoji, added in Emoji 5.0 in 2017, is doing a lot of unspoken work on April 30 in Berlin and Prague.

For the Swedish, German, and Czech audience:

A copyable greeting in Swedish, for the group chat:

Beltane (Ireland, Scotland, Wales)

Beltane is the same idea as Valborg, two countries west, with a longer pre-Christian pedigree. The name itself means “bright fire” (from the Old Irish bel, possibly a god, plus tene, fire), and it is one of the four Gaelic seasonal festivals alongside Samhain, Imbolc, and Lughnasadh. Historically, two bonfires were lit on hilltops and cattle were driven between them, three times, to cleanse the herd before summer pasture. The Welsh equivalent is Calan Mai. The Manx version is also called Beltane. All of them landed on May 1.

The modern flagship event is the Beltane Fire Festival on Calton Hill in Edinburgh, revived in 1988 by a group of artists and folklorists. About 11,000 people attend. The procession is led by the May Queen and the Green Man, two figures with much older roots (the May Queen is in Frazer’s Golden Bough; the Green Man is plastered all over English church carvings from the 11th century onward). The ceremony is fire-driven, drum-driven, and very loud. It is also the origin of why your friend who did a year abroad in Edinburgh keeps trying to get you to fly out for Beltane.

Beltane / Bealtaine palette:

Premier mai and le muguet (France)

France runs two holidays at once on May 1 and pretends it is not weird. La Fête du Travail is the labor demonstration, the CGT-led marches, the public confrontation count (in 2025 the unions said 300,000, the Interior Ministry said 157,000; Paris alone hosted somewhere between 32,000 and 100,000, depending on who is doing the counting). La Fête du Muguet is a quieter, parallel tradition where you give a sprig of lily of the valley to people you love, for luck.

The muguet origin story is very French. In 1561, King Charles IX received a sprig of muguet as a luck charm and was so charmed he started giving it to every lady in his court each May 1. The custom went from royal to popular, then in the early 20th century became a mass-market romantic gesture, and a tactical choice for the labor movement during the early 1900s, when CGT marchers swapped a banned red triangle pin for a sprig of muguet tied with a red ribbon. Today, the white sprig and the red flag are co-tenants of the same Parisian afternoon.

The numbers are absurd. France sells about 60 million sprigs of muguet on May 1, a market worth roughly 100 million euros, 90% of which is grown around Nantes. May 1 is also the only day of the year when private individuals can sell muguet on the street tax-free, as long as they stand at least 40 meters from the nearest florist and sell only muguet. The exemption is in actual French law. People do it.

For the French audience, two stacks:

A copyable greeting, for someone you do not see often:

Día del Trabajador (Latin America, Spain)

The version of Workers’ Day that travelled to Latin America has fewer flowers and more megaphones. Anarchists in Uruguay and Chile celebrated 1 de Mayo by the late 1890s. Ecuador made it official in 1915, Mexico in 1923, and most other countries in the region during the first quarter of the 20th century. The day is overtly political: marches, speeches, occasional confrontations with police. The CNT in Spain and the CGT in Argentina inherit the same iconography, and the same emojis.

On Spanish-language social media on May 1, the dominant combo is ✊🌹 with the country flag attached, followed by the 🚩 red flag and ⚒️ hammer-and-pick. In Mexico, a 1913 Labor Day parade preceded the official 1923 holiday, and the contemporary CDMX march draws tens of thousands every year. In Cuba, May 1 is one of the biggest state events of the year and Plaza de la Revolución fills with red.

A copyable post, for the timeline:

Lei Day (Hawaii)

Hawaii’s version of May 1 is the gentlest one on this list. In 1927, an Oklahoma poet named Don Blanding who had moved to Honolulu wrote a newspaper column suggesting that the islands needed a holiday celebrating their own custom of weaving and giving lei. A fellow writer, Grace Tower Warren, coined the slogan: “May Day is Lei Day in Hawaii.” The first lei contest was held on May 1, 1928. By 1929 Lei Day was an officially recognized holiday.

Each of the eight main Hawaiian islands has its own official color and lei material, codified in Hawaii Revised Statutes Section 5-16.5. The Big Island gets red 🌺 (ʻōhiʻa lehua, sacred to Pele). Oʻahu gets yellow (ʻilima, historically associated with royalty). Maui gets pink (lokelani, a damask rose). Kauaʻi gets purple (mokihana berry). Molokaʻi green (kukui), Lānaʻi orange (kaunaʻoa), Niʻihau white (pūpū shell), and Kahoʻolawe grey (hinahina). On May 1 in Honolulu, you will see all eight colors at the Kapiʻolani Park ceremony, where a Lei Queen and her court are crowned and a free public hula performance runs all afternoon.

For a Hawaiian friend or anyone who has been to a luau and is feeling sentimental:

Kodomo no Hi (Japan, May 5)

Four days after May Day, Japan closes out Golden Week with こどもの日, Kodomo no Hi, Children’s Day. Until 1948 it was Boys’ Day (Tango no sekku, one of the five seasonal court ceremonies, dating to the imperial calendar) and was about celebrating sons. In 1948 it was renamed to include all children and to recognize mothers along with fathers. The ceremony moved with the renaming, but the imagery did not.

The dominant visual is the koinobori, a carp-shaped windsock raised on a pole outside the house, one for each family member. The Chinese legend is that a carp that swims upstream past the Dragon Gate becomes a dragon; the carp is therefore the symbol of perseverance. Black carp for the father, red or pink for the mother, smaller blue and green for each child. The 🎏 carp streamer emoji was added to Unicode 6.0 in 2010 specifically for this holiday. In April and early May the Japanese sky fills with them; if you have been on Shinkansen during Golden Week, you have seen hundreds.

A short Japanese greeting:

Bevrijdingsdag (Netherlands, May 5)

The Dutch share their May 5 with Japan but for entirely different reasons. On May 5, 1945, German forces in the Netherlands signed a capitulation agreement at Hotel de Wereld in Wageningen, ending five years of occupation. Bevrijdingsdag became a national holiday in 1990. It is preceded by Dodenherdenking on May 4, the Dutch remembrance day, with two minutes of national silence at 8 PM.

On the night of May 4 to 5, the mayor of Wageningen lights the Bevrijdingsvuur, the Liberation Flame, in front of Hotel de Wereld. About 1,300 runners spread the flame from there to roughly 200 towns before dawn. By midday on May 5, fourteen official Bevrijdingsfestivals are running across the country with over 200 Dutch artists on 40 stages, the largest single music event in the Netherlands. The traditional closer is the May 5 concert in Amsterdam, broadcast live, that ends with Vera Lynn’s “We’ll Meet Again” while the King and Queen sail away on the Amstel.

For Dutch friends, on May 5:

Bonfire, bouquet, or barricade?

With eight different traditions stacked on the same week, the practical question is which one matches your actual vibe this year. The sorter below asks five questions and pairs you with a bonfire pagan, a Workers’ Day protester, a muguet picnicker, or a spring reveler, plus a copyable combo and caption to match.

Cross-platform: how 💐 and 🎏 actually render

Most of the May Day emojis render consistently across platforms, but a few are platform-loaded. The 💐 bouquet is a tight tied-stem cluster on Apple, a looser garden bunch on Samsung, and a flat illustration on Google Noto. The 🎏 carp streamer is genuinely beautiful on most sets but reads almost abstract on Toss Face. The ✊ raised fist comes in five Fitzpatrick skin-tone modifiers and the default yellow, and platforms differ on whether the wrist is shown.

AppleGoogleSamsungMicrosoftWhatsAppFacebookTwitterJoyPixelsToss FaceMozillaEmojidexLGHTCHuaweiFxEmojiEmojiTwoOpenMojiFluent 3DTelegramMS TeamsSoftBankSony PlayStationNoto AnimatedEmojiOneEmojiOneDocomoAU KDDINoto EmojiSerenityOS

AppleiOS 18.4

GoogleAndroid 15

SamsungOne UI 6.1

TwitterTwemoji

JoyPixels9.0

Toss Face1.0

OpenMojiOutlined

Sources