April Fools’ Day
Published on Apr 1, 2007 at 8:12 am.
1 Comment.
Filed under calendars.
Today is April 1. Since childhood, I remember this day as being a day of practical jokes. People would tell you something outrageous, and then if you believed it, they’d laugh and shout “April Fools!” Sometimes major newspapers will have a joke by making up crazy stories and printing them on the front page. Of course, the trouble is that this makes these newspapers look pretty much identical to the supermarket tabloids. But, where did all this come from? I got to thinking about it this year, and so I decided to do today’s post on April Fools’ Day.
I didn’t really know the history of April Fools, so I decided to read up on it. I figured that surely something so silly and inane must have originated here in the US. But, much to my surprise, it is something that we imported from Europe! I didn’t find any authoritative history of the day, but I did find several sources with the same anecdotal history.
April Fools obviously isn’t any sort of official holiday. It doesn’t have historical, political, or religious roots. It is something that just sort of happened. Apparently, spring-time tomfoolery has been around since ancient times, but no explanation is given. Maybe it’s the giddiness of spring. But, that is something spread out over the season. It doesn’t explain April Fools. But, I did find something that seemed to make sense.
If you recall my post about New Year’s Day, January 1 has not always been the start of the year. Many countries started the year at different times. A number of countries started the year at the Vernal Equinox (or March 21 when the equinox was supposed to happen under the calendar). So, one day it would be March 20, 1134, and the next day would be March 21, 1135. Other countries started at Easter, or Christmas, and a few January 1. But, as you can imagine, it is silly to start the year in the middle of the month, so those that started at the equinox or Easter eventually moved towards either March 1 or April 1 as the New Year’s Day. April 1 was closer to the original, so that was more popular. And, often the new year was celebrated by a week and a half of fesitivities, so even starting March 21, the festivities ended April 1.
But, all that was to come to an end. It is really difficult if every country, or worse, different parts of the same country, incremented the year on different dates. That made for a very poor way of keeping track of things. As Europe emerged from the Dark Ages (when nobody cared much about their own locality, anyway), it became apparent that a uniform start date was needed. So, January 1 was decreed the new starting date for the year. For sure, the new starting date was decreed in the new Gregorian Calendar in 1582, but some countries, such as France, adopted the new January 1 starting date a few years earlier.
Well, this is where, anecdotaly, the practice of New Years Day began. Leave it to the French to come up with something like this! It began when some people stubbornly refused to accept that the beginning of the year had moved to January 1. They continued to celebrate New Year’s on April 1. Now, in those days, news often traveled slowly, so you can forgive some people for not knowing. But, many, even after the new calendar rules had been explained to them, still refused to accept that the year began on January 1. They would say something like, “Well that’s fine, but I have decided that I am going to celebrate it on this date.” They had already decided when they were going to have their New Year’s party and they weren’t going to change. Well, the more enlightened people were exasperated and called these stubborn people April Fools. Such people were thought to be a bit daff. Eventually, they were the butt of jokes. People would send them on fools errands, play practical jokes on them, and tell them all sorts of outlandish stories just to see if they’d believe them. Hence, the origin of April Fools’ day.
Interestingly, I can understand how the people who knew what was going on felt when people around them stubbornly refused to accept the rules of the calendar. It reminds me of 1999. There were all these big end-of-the-century and end-of-the-millenium parties set for December 31, 1999. You could explain to people the rules of the calendar: that the First Century started with year 1 and ended with year 100, the Second Century with year 101 and ended with 200, and so forth, making the Twentieth Century begin with the year 1901 and end 2000, so the actual end-of-the-century party (and end-of-the-millenium party) should be December 31, 2000, not 1999. Still, so many people decided that the official rules of the calendar didn’t apply to them. “Well that’s fine, but I have decided that I am going to celebrate it on this date,” they’d say (Sound familiar?). Of course, the whole thing was also compounded by the y2k bug. People wanted to celebrate the end of the century a year early because the y2k but was going to caused computers across the world to come to a halt at midnight December 31, 1999, and everyone’s bank accounts to reset to zero, planes to fall out of the sky, power plants to shut down, cars to quit running, …. Oh, wait. None of that happened. Hmm.
April Fools.
-Astroprof
Brian Song on April 1, 2007 at 10:54 am: 1
You may wish to check out this april foo’s prank involving space tourism.
http://www.why-is-the-sky-blue.tv/madonna-space-tourist.html