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A May Pole Party For
CHILDREN NE teacher planned a very happy May party for her little boy and girl pupils.
There was no chance to set up a big May pole out-of-doors for the children to wind, but her idea turned out to be more original and maybe even more jolly, There were eighteen children included in the party, which was held in the park. On arriving, each child was given a little peaked paper cap of bright colored tissue paper.
The boys liked these as well as the girls did, although they found them harder to keep in place on their heads. As soon as the children had donned their caps, three of the tallest children were appointed to "help teacher." This helping consisted in marching proudly out from behind a screen of bushes, carrying three gay little May poles, decked with flowers and colored paper streamers. [48] They had been made by swinging a barrel hoop from a broomstick handle, by means of a number of ribbon-like strips of cloth. Of course the hoops were wound with the cloth, and besides that were trimmed with apple blossoms and lilacs.
From the rim of each hoop the cloth strips hung straight down for two or three feet.
The colors on the May pole matched the colored caps that the children wore.
There proved to be just fifteen streamers, and each child was allowed to pick out a streamer to correspond with the color of the cap worn. Thus a little girl with a pink cap would pick out a pink streamer; a little boy with a green cap, a green streamer, and so on.
The children who held the May poles were then asked to stand at some distance apart out in the open space of the park, and each little group of five danced round and round, and back and forth, holding and twisting their colored streamers.
Somehow this amused tnem almost all the long spring afternoon. Different children [49] took turns holding the May poles and sometimes they would even form a procession and hippity-hop around the park. They paraded down Main Street for a little way, but came back to the park in time to play "Drop the Handkerchief," "Hide and Seek," and "Tag," before refreshments were served.
They were perfectly delighted, of course, with strawberry lemonade, brown bread sandwiches, and little frosted cup cakes, which their teacher's mother had made and on which she had outlined in pink candies the individual initials of the children. [50]
A children’s party improvised by a teacher with no money, no hall and no maypole, which is why it is one of the more useful pages in the book. The whole thing is built from a broomstick and a barrel hoop.
- The maypole is a hoop on a stickA barrel hoop hung from a broomstick on strips of cloth, the hoop wound with the same cloth and trimmed with blossom, and the strips left hanging down two or three feet as streamers. A barrel hoop is the one part you cannot buy; an embroidery hoop, a hula hoop or a bicycle wheel rim does the same job.
- The arithmetic does not add up, and then it doesEighteen children, three poles, fifteen streamers, five dancers to a pole. The missing three are the children holding the poles. Anyone counting ribbons from this page will come up short unless they notice that.
- Apple blossom and lilac date it to a fortnightBoth are brief and both are over quickly once cut. The decoration ties this party to the two or three weeks when they are out, which is the sort of constraint the book treats as obvious and a modern reader has to be told.
- Tissue paper caps will not stay onThe page says as much: the boys found them harder to keep in place. A loop of elastic under the chin or a hairgrip through the brim fixes it, and the caps matter because the cap colour is how each child finds their streamer.
- Eighteen children and one adult, down Main StreetThe party walks out of the park and parades along a public road, with one teacher in charge. That is the single largest difference between this page and anything that could be organised now, and it is worth noticing before copying the plan.
- Initials in pink candiesEach child’s cup cake was iced with their own initials outlined in small sweets. It costs nothing, it takes an evening, and of everything on the page it is the detail a child would remember.
The page is a record of improvisation under constraint, and it says so in its first lines: there was no chance to set up a big maypole out of doors, so the teacher made three small ones instead, and the writer thinks the result was better. That is the method of the entire book. What it also shows is how much common knowledge the reader was assumed to have. Nobody is told what winding a maypole means, or how the dance goes, or why children would want to do it; the activity is treated as something every reader learned as a child and could organise from a single sentence. A modern host copying this party has to supply all of that, and will find that the hardest part of the page is not the hoops or the streamers but knowing what is supposed to happen once the children pick up the ribbons.