The maypole was of course at first no pole cut down and dried.  The gist of it was that it should be a “sprout, well budded out.”  The object of carrying in the May was to bring the very spirit of life and greenery into the village.  When this was forgotten, idleness or economy would prompt the villagers to use the same tree or branch year after year.  In the villages of Upper Bavaria Dr. Frazer[13] tells us the maypole is renewed once every three, four, or five years.  It is a fir-tree fetched from the forest, and amid all the wreaths, flags, and inscriptions with which it is bedecked, an essential part is the bunch of dark green foliage left at the top, “as a memento that in it we have to do, not with a dead pole, but with a living tree from the greenwood.”

At the ritual of May Day not only was the fresh green bough or tree carried into the village, but with it came a girl or a boy, the Queen or King of the May.  Sometimes the tree itself, as in Russia, is dressed up in woman’s clothes; more often a real man or maid, covered with flowers and greenery, walks with the tree or carries the bough.  Thus in Thuringia,[14] as soon as the trees begin to be green in spring, the children assemble on a Sunday and go out into the woods, where they choose one of their playmates to be Little Leaf Man.  They break branches from the trees and twine them about the child, till only his shoes are left peeping out.  Two of the other children lead him for fear he should stumble.  They take him singing and dancing from house to house, asking for gifts of food, such as eggs, cream, sausages, cakes.  Finally, they sprinkle the Leaf Man with water and feast on the food.  Such a Leaf Man is our English Jack-in-the-Green, a chimney-sweeper who, as late as 1892, was seen by Dr. Rouse walking about at Cheltenham encased in a wooden framework covered with greenery.

The bringing in of the new leafage in the form of a tree or flowers is one, and perhaps the simplest, form of spring festival.  It takes little notice of death and winter, uttering and emphasizing only the desire for the joy in life and spring.  But in other and severer climates the emotion is fiercer and more complex; it takes the form of a struggle or contest, what the Greeks called an agon.  Thus on May Day in the Isle of Man a Queen of the May was chosen, and with her twenty maids of honour, together with a troop of young men for escort.  But there was not only a Queen of the May, but a Queen of Winter, a man dressed as a woman, loaded with warm clothes and wearing a woollen hood and fur tippet.  Winter, too, had attendants like the Queen of the May.  The two troops met and fought; and whichever Queen was taken prisoner had to pay the expenses of the feast.