May Day (And Good Luck With Finals)

 

Rio Students Around the May Pole - 1959

 

The following is from page 165 of our Folklore of American Holidays: 

A spring festival common in Europe and North America, May Day is celebrated by the gathering of knots, branches, and flowers on May Eve or early on May 1st morning; by the crowning of a May queen; by choral performances at daybreak; by dancing around a May pole; and by mumming (merrymaking in a mask or disguise) from house to house carrying blossoms and soliciting gifts and food.

The sports of May Day symbolize spring, relating human fertility to crop fertility and rebirth. Once it was common for young couples to pair up, often by lot, and “may together" in the woods all May Eve night.

Such goings on, to say nothing of the phallic symbolism of the May Pole, horrified British Puritans.

In his history of the Plymouth colony, William Bradford reports that in 1628, when the nearby Anglican colony at Mount Merry "set up a maypole, drinking and dancing about it . . . inviting Indian women for their consorts," the Pilgrim Fathers sent a military party to cut it down and punish the offenders. 

Since then in America maypole dancing has been, on the whole, a tame affair. 

Cohen, Hennig, and Tristram Potter Coffin. The Folklore of American Holidays. Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1987. Print. In Reference Collection on Main Floor: R 394.26973 F666

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