UK - London - Jack in the Green May Day celebration

Members of the Deptford Jack in the Green dance from pub to pub to Greenwich, London to mark the start of spring. In the 16th and 17th centuries in England, people would make garlands of flowers and leaves for the May Day celebration. After becoming a source of competition between works Guilds. Participants wear traditional green faces and forest foliage, at tradition from the 17th Century custom of milkmaids going out on May Day with the utensils of their trade decorated with garlands and piled into a pyramid which they carried on their heads. Amongst modern "folkies" and neo-pagans the Jack in the Green has become identified with the mysterious Green Man depicted in mediaeval church carvings and is widely felt to be an embodiment of natural fertility, a spirit of the primeval greenwood and a trickster.

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Members of the Deptford Jack in the Green dance from pub to pub to Greenwich, London to mark the start of spring. In the 16th and 17th centuries in England, people would make garlands of flowers and leaves for the May Day celebration. After becoming a source of competition between works Guilds. Participants wear traditional green faces and forest foliage, at tradition from the 17th Century custom of milkmaids going out on May Day with the utensils of their trade decorated with garlands and piled into a pyramid which they carried on their heads. Amongst modern "folkies" and neo-pagans the Jack in the Green has become identified with the mysterious Green Man depicted in mediaeval church carvings and is widely felt to be an embodiment of natural fertility, a spirit of the primeval greenwood and a trickster.