The holiday is also known by other names, such as:

• “The Fourth”: “Some wealthier farmers and businessmen, like James Reed, could afford to stock the recesses of their wagons with bottles of brandy and champagne, which they brought out to celebrate the Fourth, the crossing of the continental divide, or other special occasions.”—John Mack Faragher, Women and Men on the Overland Trail, (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 1979), p. 94
• “Independence Day”: “Monday, July 4th. This was ‘independence day’ in Boston. What firing of guns, and ringing of bells, and rejoicings of all sorts, in every part of our country!”—Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Two Years Before the Mast (1840), and “Joe Sestak stepped out of a Chevy Suburban on the morning of July 3 and met up with a group of 15 campaign volunteers gathered in the parking lot of a drugstore in Canonsburg, Pa., just southwest of Pittsburgh. The town is the birthplace of Perry Como. It is also said to have the largest Independence Day parade in western Pennsylvania. Sestak and his supporters walked across an intersection and took their assigned place near the back of a procession amid firetrucks, dune buggies, a horse-drawn carriage, a bagpipe band and an S.U.V. ferrying Junior Miss Mid Mon Valley, an 8-year-old beauty queen sitting on top of the vehicle with her legs dangling through the sunroof. Sestak, a Navy admiral turned politician, surveyed the scene, then turned to me and said: ‘I heard this parade was gigantic and wonderful. But look at this!’”—Michael Sokolove, “Joe Sestak, the 60th Democrat,” The New York Times, August 22, 2010.
• “July Fourth”: “Memorial Day is the most profound holiday of the year. July Fourth may be more significant to us as a nation, but this is the one that brings lumps to our throats. I gaze at the waves of small American flags in cemeteries, flapping in the breeze like Kansas wheat, and I am overwhelmed.”—Sam Allis, “Never forget: Those beautiful flags, big and small, each signify a death in combat in service to our country,” The Boston Globe, May 31, 2010, and “The crack of the ball off a wooden bat, the soft thud of the ball into an outfielder’s outstretched glove and cheers as a home run sails out of the park. The sounds of baseball are as much a part of summer as evening thunderstorms and July Fourth fireworks.”—Amy Orndorff, “This Ballgame Is in the ‘burbs,” The Washington Post, June 25, 2010, p. T05.

The expression is pronounced as “May December” with the hyphen ignored. This is different than in other phrases using the names of the months and a hyphen where “to” or “through” is generally substituted for the hyphen.

Sometimes different months can be substituted to indicate an even larger difference in age: “May-November romance, even a March-December”—Sir Alfred McGlennan Keith (Eric Blore) in “The Lady Eve” (Sturges, 1941)

This use of “May” and “December” is similar to the use of the name of the month “September” to indicate age in the expression “September Years.”

The expression was used in as the title of the song “The September of My Years” (1965) by Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen and originally sung by Frank Sinatra.

This use of “September” is similar to the use of the names of the months “May” and “December” to indicate the ages of a romantic couple with a large difference in ages in the expression “May-December Romance.”

As “November” can be used to indicate general elections in the United States, “October” can be used to indicate something that happens on the eve of the election in the phrase “October Surprise.”

“The Dirty Dozen” was 1967 film directed by Robert Aldrich. In the film, a group of twelve American soldiers—all of whom were convicted of serious crimes—are sent on a suicide mission during World War II just before D-Day behind German lines. In addition to such prominent actors, such as Charles Bronson, Jim Brown, John Cassavetes, Telly Savalas, and Donald Sutherland, who were members of the “Dirty Dozen” (listed above), there were other famous actors who appeared in the film but weren’t members of the “Dirty Dozen,” such as Lee Marvin, who is the group’s commanding officer, and Ernest Borgnine and George Kennedy, who both appear high-ranking officers in the film.

The Dodecanese are a chain of islands in the Aegean Sea just off the western coast of Turkey. The name “Dodecanese” means “twelve islands” in Greek.  While there are over 150 islands in the chain only a couple of dozen are inhabited.  The name for the chain comes from the twelve largest of these islands.

From the 1500′s to 1912, the chain was controlled by the Ottoman Turks, but were seized by the Italians in that year. After World War II, the Greeks regained control of the Dodecanese.

The most famous of the islands in the Dodecanese is probably Rhodes with the Colossus of Rhodes, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, in ancient times, and the Knights Hospitaller (later the Knights of Malta after they lost the Siege of Rhodes in 1480) operating from their base on the island during the Middle Ages. In a famous incident in Ancient Roman times, recounted in Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, Julius Caesar was kidnapped in his youth by pirates off the Dodecanese.

“Jesus said to them, ‘Truly I tell you, at the renewal of all things, when the Son of Man is seated on the throne of his glory, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.’”—Matthew 19.28

“You are those who have stood by me in my trials; and I confer on you, just as my Father has conferred on me, a kingdom, so that you may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom, and you will sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel.”—Luke 22.28-30.