May is on its way out, and spring has finally established itself in this neck of the woods. Let’s close out the month with a May Festival held at Greenfield Village back in 1930.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feQLaIdAsxM]

In this celebration at Greenfield Village, approximately 250 children participate in versions of traditional May Day festivities. Some children carry arches of flowers, some are in costume, some are part of the queen’s court. We witness the crowning of the Queen of the May. Various old-fashioned dances are performed for the queen and her court, as taught by dance instructor and head of Greenfield Village Schools, Benjamin Lovett. (My favorite is the Jockey Dance!) Dances are also performed around a Maypole, and all participants take part in dancing the quadrille. The film closes with older children dancing in the Lovett Hall ballroom and an aerial view of Greenfield Village.

Noting that the festival was May 24, this archivist was somewhat surprised at finding it not uncommon for May Festivals to be held later in May, rather than on May Day, May 1 (having nothing more to go on than vague memories of elementary school Maypole dances–not to mention different connotations of the day, such as observances for the Labor movement and disaster preparedness for libraries, archives, and museums). Presumably this timeframe was built around when the weather got nicer in northern climes? Or perhaps it was the influence of the Dutch and later African American observances of Pinkster celebrated in late May or early June, some of which included Maypoles, and which, though tied linguistically to the church year–Pinkster deriving from the Dutch for “Pentecost”–were quite obviously also linked to the seasons and growing conditions. On the other hand, May Day and May Festival observances in Europe seem not to have been rigidly fixed to May 1. Did they party the whole month long? Sometimes they did, it would seem (with a translation into modern English courtesy of Wikipedia), or perhaps mixed and merged practices with other similar festivals.

Although the upcoming Memorial Day is a time of reverent, even somber, remembrance for many, let us also look to the joys of spring and warmer weather.