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It’s the merry, merry month of May! Spring is in full blossom and summer is just around the corner. This is your favorite day!

Waiting with your friends in the dew-strewn dawn for the few remaining sleepy heads to arrive, you chatter away with excitement. When the stragglers arrive you all take off for the woodland glens and meadows. You have been charged with the joyous responsibility of bringing back bushels and cartloads of flowers and boughs.

Dancing around the oxcart that carries your collected flowers, you return to the village in the gentle sunlight and sweetly scented air of mid-morning. While you were away, a large wooden pole has been erected on the village commons. Hewn from a tree, the pole rises 12 feet and has brightly colored ribbons streaming from its top. Each ribbon is one and half times the height of the pole, or 18 feet in length.

You and your friends fashion garlands to decorate the village and the May Pole. The leaves and flowers represent a language of their own and if you were to find a branch of mountain ash on your windowsill, it would be a sign of love from an admirer.

Finally, it’s time for the May Pole Dance. This year you are old enough to be one of the 12 dancers. Six young men with flowers in their buttonholes accompany 6 maidens crowned with flowers to the May Pole. Then the 6 lads each take hold of a ribbon and stand in a circle around the pole. The 6 lasses also each grab a ribbon and form an outer circle, farther away from the pole. In a complicated dance that you all practiced for days, you step to the bagpipe music and circle the May Pole, twining the gaily-colored ribbons into an elaborate braid around the pole. The braiding of the ribbons brings you all closer and closer together until you are out of ribbon and in a tight circle round the pole. Then it all begins again, this time in reverse, dancing in a pattern that takes you farther and farther from the pole, unwinding all the streamers.

You smile with pleasure as the gathered crowd applauds your performance and then you and your friends are free to join the merrymaking. Two of the village girls will be chosen to preside over the festivities. One will be Lady Flora, queen of the spring flowers, and the other will be Lady May, queen of the May Day celebration. There will be games and archery contests and of course, a feast for the hungry revelers.

When the sun has set and the bonfire is blazing brightly, you’ll have the memories of a glorious day tucked away. The reminiscence will be a cheerful antidote to the dreary days of next winter and a reminder that May Day will come again.