Dates are delicate things, and you must use care and recommended modules, as already shown.

But for such a trivial task you can simply check if you are in January-April (months 0-3 in localtime's 4th element in the list form) ie (localtime(time))[4]<=3 to be sure being before 1st of May:

perl -E "say qq(we are ),(localtime(time))[4]<=3?qq(BEFORE):qq(AFTER),
+qq( 1st of May)"

we are AFTER 1st of May
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L*