April Fool's Day!

References to April Fool’s Day can be found as early as the 1500s. However, these early references were infrequent and tended to be vague and ambiguous.

The most popular theory about the origin of April Fool’s Day involves the French calendar reform of the sixteenth century. The theory goes like this: In 1564 France reformed its calendar, moving the start of the year from the end of March to January 1. Those who failed to keep up with the change, who stubbornly clung to the old calendar system and continued to celebrate the New Year during the week that fell between March 25th and April 1st, had jokes played on them. Pranksters would surreptitiously stick paper fish to their backs. The victims of this prank were thus called Poisson d’Avril, or April Fish — which, to this day, remains the French term for April Fools — and so the tradition was born.

The calendar-change hypothesis is more plausible if applied to Britain, because it was the British, not the French, who observed New Year’s Day on March 25 (the date of the christian Feast of Annunciation), followed by a week of festivities culminating on April 1. Britain only changed the start of its calendar year to January 1 in 1752. However, by this time April Fool’s Day was already a well-established tradition so confusion about the calendar change could not have been responsible for the origin of the custom in Britain. The earliest unambiguous references to April Fool’s Day actually come from continental Europe, suggesting it is there that April Fool’s Day began.

One of the worst April Fool's Day pranks: Glenn Howlett's colleagues at London city hall thought they had dreamed up a great gag. They sent him a memo informing him that the really big report he was working on was going to be due early, in just two weeks. The tip-off was that the memo was dated April 1st. Ha Ha. Except Howlett didn't realize it was a joke. He received the memo while on vacation and immediately cut his vacation short and phoned the office to tell everyone to start getting busy. But as he contemplated the new deadline he worked himself up into an increasing state of panic, until soon he began to experience heart palpitations. Finally he collapsed from the stress and had to take leave from work. As he was recovering he realized it just wasn't worth risking his health to finish the report, so he filed for early retirement. At which point someone told him the early deadline was just a joke. He responded by suing for damages. As a consequence of his lawsuit, city hall banned employees from pulling any more pranks.

One of the best pranks happened in 1957 in England. The respected BBC news show Panorama announced that thanks to a very mild winter and the virtual elimination of the dreaded spaghetti weevil, Swiss farmers were enjoying a bumper spaghetti crop. Accompanying this announcement was footage of "Swiss peasants" pulling strands of spaghetti down from trees. Huge numbers of viewers were taken in. Many called the BBC wanting to know how they could grow their own spaghetti tree. To this the BBC diplomatically replied, "place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best."


Information taken from http://www.museumofhoaxes.com