As a matter of interest, stealing the maypole was very much part of the tradition in a friend's village (in North Wales). Specifically, the men's job was to create the maypole while the women created the garlands. Then the women would steal the men's pole, with taunts (of course you can imagine what kind of taunts) and the men had to get it back before the dancing could begin.
We did this one May eve a few years back. It was raining steadily and the men hadn't expected us to steal their pole, so it took quite a lot of taunting to get them to follow us into the very wet forest. By the time the pole was re-erected (can't write any of this without the double entendres) there were several mud slicks where we were dancing, and I can only say that some of the dancing was less than graceful as a result. But we laughed. A lot. Trouble was, we couldn't tell when the sun had actually risen because there was so much cloud cover, so we probably danced a lot longer than necessary.

Anne