This is the note to the version collected from Irish Traveller, Mileen McCarthy.
Jim Carroll

This cumulative song, sometimes called The Everlasting Circle, occasionally continues beyond where Mikeen's leaves off, adding a bed from the feathers, a lad on the bed, a maid with the lad, a baby from the maid, a boy grown from the baby, an acorn planted by the boy, a tree from the acorn, and so the circle is completed and the cycle starts again. The complete "circle" is not found in print very often, perhaps due to the fact that many of the early collectors found it too dubious a subject; Baring Gould, for instance, omitted it from the second edition of "Songs And Ballads of The West.    It has been suggested that the song is connected to ritual, but there is no firm evidence of this, rather it is more likely to be part of a singing game. Ann Gilchrist in The Journal of The Folk Song Society 1909, mentions variations on the theme having been found in Wales, Brittany, Denmark, Switzerland and France; William Wells Newell suggested that it originally came to America from France, via the children of émigrés, though the text he gives from Savannah, Georgia is very similar to the British and Irish ones.
Reference
The Everlasting Circle                                       James Reeves
Journal of The Folk Song Society 1909
Games And Songs of American Children           William Wells Newell