Весела пролет [happy spring]

Our son sent us a card from Bulgaria with the traditional greeting for March 1. Inside, he writes:

Happy 1st of March and best wishes for the coming Spring!
    P.S. This card is a production of school children from the town of Rila.

    In subsequent email he explains that "Chestita Baba Marta is like Happy Grandmother Marta, or Greetings for the 1st of March." "Chestita Baba Marta" is phonetic, I think, for the "Цесмчма Баба Марма" in the photo—I'm impressing into service, as well as I can manage, letters found on the web¹, as Cyrillic is Greek to me, alas, despite having a Bulgarian grandson whose father has lived in Bulgaria almost twenty years.
    My son explains that "the Martenitsa (the red and white yarn ornaments) are like good luck charms for meeting the spring. People wear them until they've seen a stork and then hang them on a blooming plant or tree."

So, why am I publishing this greeting on May 1? The card arrived only a couple of weeks ago and I had accordingly misread "March" in my son's note. But I see now that it is dated 2.28.10. All the fortnight I've planned to wish my readers a happy 1st of May! I must have figured that "coming Spring" was appropriate for Bulgaria on May 1, but now I remember how like California's climate I thought Bulgaria's when I visited there. Or, more likely, secure in my assumption that I was receiving a May 1st greeting, this never even occurred to me. As I've said more than a few times on this blog, we humans have little trouble deluding ourselves.
    Well, let the joke be on me. You, certainly, may you have had a Baba Marta, and have a happy May! And no jokes on you in either month.

As for humans' deluding themselves, it's so easy to do, one must wonder whether it was an evolutionary adaptation, perhaps to enable us to look at things in a hopeful light and avoid seeing stark reality (so as to lessen the chance that we would kill ourselves before producing offspring). God's in his heaven, suicide's a mortal sin, and all that.
_______________

1. From the website:

   THE BULGARIAN ALPHABET—БЪЛГАРСКАТА АЗБУКА
   Before you start learning [the] Bulgarian language, you need to learn the Bulgarian alphabet.
       In Bulgarian, we use the Cyrillic alphabet. The same alphabet (with some modifications) is used in other languages [such] as Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Serbian, Macedonian, and some Central Asian Altaic languages.
       Every Bulgarian letter has an English equivalent close enough to give you a clue as to its pronunciation. In the first few lessons, every Bulgarian word I use will be followed by [a] phonetic transcription of its pronunciation. For this, I will use Latin letters—the ones in the column "Symbol" [not shown in this footnote].