Don't Get Fooled!
April fools – the day when all gloves are off and it’s okay for friends and family to play tricks on one another. Did that day always had the same meaning or did we change the traditions and its definition into the one we know today?
The genesis of the day of pranks started in the late medieval times. Some say it goes back to the old roman tradition – Cerialia, which celebrated the godess Ceres, at the beginning of April. The legend says that when she was looking for her kidnapped daughter, Proserpina, she was tricked by the god of the underworld, Pluto, and could only hear the faint echoes of her daughter.
Other theory of origin of this prank-filled day is the switch from the old Julian calendar to the Gregorian one (which we use till this day) in the late 16th century. The old calendar celebrated New Years between 25th of March and the 1st of April but in the new Gregorian one it started, as we know now, on the 1st of January. That made people who still used the out-dated calendar to be mocked. In France they had fish stuck to their backs and were named Posson d’Avril (April Fish).
In the Bible the „April’s Fool” was Noah, who after the flood mistakenly sent a dove to check if the waters have gone down when in reality they did not. Also another story of when Jesus was sent from Pontius Pilate to Herod and then back again could signify a foolish activity that may have some connotation to the Day of Fools.
The celebrations on this day usually can be seen and heard all around, in television, radio and the internet leading to comical situations and people laughing at the unique absurdity in their everyday lives. For example, in 1957 the BBC ran a fake tv report about the Swiss harvesting spaghetti from trees, in 2008 they reported on a newly disovered species of flying penguins. On the radio in 1976 the British astronomer Sir Patrick Moore told listeners of BBC Radio 2 that because of the alignment of the planets at precicely 09:47 in the morning the gravity would change and people could be pulled up slightly into the air, this made the listeners of the programme to jump into the air and claiming to feel lighter. In 2009 thanks to RedFM radio station people were told that the band U2 would be playing a secret concert on a roof of one of the shopping malls in Cork, in England. The disappointment and confused faces of the tricked people were definitely priceless. The google search engine is a part of April Fool’s Day hoax for a long time. Their pranks include: tilting the text of the search results when someone googles the word „tilt”, writing „Atari Breakout” in the image search will morph the results into the classic brick-breaking puzzle game, if a user searches for „anagram” the search engine will ask „did you mean ‘nag a ram?’” (which is ironically an anagram), and finally writing „Zerg rush” will change the search results into a pack of hungry viruses eating the page.
There will always be people who use the opportunity of the 1st of April to make practical jokes at someone’s expense. That alone is why April Fools is such a special day. It makes people stop being serious for a moment and let their crazy side be seen. And that is what we wish to You :)
Grzegorz Konopski
