Adorable or testosterone overload?

So Friday night my Betreuungslehrerin (she of the sudden soccer games) dragged me off to her Dorf to watch the Maibaumausstellung. Basically this is an excuse for the men of the village to tie together two impossibly long tree trunks and then stick them in the ground using a crane. However, it's based on an interesting tradition. Families with eligible young women used to put the trees in their yard on May 1, and then the boys would go around and see who had a tree, and mating would ensue (more or less). The town would also put one up, and the night before it went in the hole, the town's young men would have to guard it all night against raids by the neighboring town's boys, who would try to steal the tree and sell it into slavery or something.

The little pine-tree bit on the end of the town's connected trunks is dressed up with red and yellow and white ribbons (to represent Burgenland, I think) and a random doll figure made of pants and a shirt stuffed with old newspapers. I think it was supposed to be either a guy or a bear in pants climbing the tree, but it was hard to tell from the angle I was looking at. Why it was on there is anyone's guess—represting the desperate, love-starved young men of former eras, perhaps? Some thinly veiled reference to sex? Probably.

After it's decorated, everybody from the town comes to see if anybody will be crushed to death when they set the tree up, which is a likely possibility considering the number of small children allowed to run wild and the fact that there is free beer and wine for everybody. The whole setting-up process takes about 20 minutes, during which six men hold the trunk, one guy runs the crane, and two hundred people criticize and drink beer. After they get it in the hole, they put in the shims and then they force people into service, pounding them in place with sledgehammer while the children run back and forth underfoot, apparently bored with the now non–life-threatening crane. In St. Michael the mayor was forced to do a lot of the work, because people kept saying, "Well, what else is he good for?"

Of course, the tree didn't end up entirely perpendicular to the ground, so it kind of hovers threateningly over the roof of the nearby restaurant/hotel. Nobody seems too concerned about this, despite the fact that two years ago a strong wind came along and caused thousands of dollars of damage to that very roof by repeatedly smacking the Maibaum right into it.

So we did that, and then we went and ate the largest bowls of fruity ice cream you've ever seen at the one café in town. A solid evening's entertainment, I feel.