Naturalist's Almanac

I'm an easy mark for anyone looking for some fun on April 1. I'm gullible, and I'm so busy looking for returning birds right then that I never remember it's April Fool’s Day until I've been duped. Why is it that people try to make fools of each other on April 1?

As with many of the traditions we've inherited from one set of ancestors or another, historians don't know the exact origins of April Fool’s Day, but it dates back to at least 1582. That was the year Pope Gregory XIII reformed Julius Caesar's calendar to realign it with the natural year.

Pope Gregory's most significant reforms had to do with getting rid of the extra leap days that had accumulated and devising a more precise formula for future leap years. But he also changed the date of the New Year back to Julius Caesar's original January 1.

Christians had been celebrating the New Year on March 25 as part of their Feast of the Annunciation, and their New Year's activities lasted for a week, culminating on April 1. To common folk, habit and tradition seemed more real than a calender that could be changed by a Pope, so some clung stubbornly to their March 25-April 1 celebrations.

According to folklorists, the people who resisted the change — or forgot about it — became likely targets for practical jokes. They were the original April Fools, who were limited to parts of Europe at first because only some European Catholics adopted the Gregorian calendar right away.

The English didn't adopt Pope Gregory's changes until 1752. By that time, everyone had forgotten why April 1 was April Fool’s Day, as evidenced by a 1760 poem in Poor Robin's Almanack: "The first of April, some do say,/Is set apart for All Fools' Day,/But why the people call it so,/Nor I nor they themselves do know."

If the English were confused, their American colonists had even less of a notion about why they should try to fool each other on April 1. But the practical jokes that had become the mainstay of April Fools' traditions must have been appealing to winter weary New Englanders because even after a revolution and two hundred plus years, my friends are still April Fooling me.

MORE INFORMATION

Elaine's April Fool's Day Page
http://homepages.tesco.net/derek.berger/holidays/aprilfool.html

Elaine offers an attractive page full of quotations, different practices in different countries, A Fool's Dictionary, poems, and ideas for harmless pranks.

April Fool's Day
http://www.americaslibrary.gov/cgi-bin/page.cgi/jb/modern/aprfool_1

This Library of Congress site offers a short, kid-friendly explanation of April Fool's Day. It includes old photos plus a video showing an old-fashioned prank.

Google Technology
http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html

Google had some fun creating this spoof for April Fool's Day 2002.

April Fool's Day - Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fool's_Day

The Wikipedia offers more information about April Fool's Day than most of us want to know. But it does include a long list of famous hoaxes and related links.