April Fool's Day...Gotcha!

I had almost forgotten the significance of today until I was on the phone with my friend, and he started telling me the weirdest story. He was out in Longs, buying pencils, and decided to buy a diet Coke. That is, until the person behind the register asked for some ID. Since when did buying a diet Coke require an ID?! The sales clerk even called over her manager, and kept repeating that they couldn't sell my friend a diet Coke without any ID. My friend got more and more confused and frustrated until finally, the sales clerk yelled, "April Fool's Day...Gotcha!", and everybody in the store burst out laughing. By that time, my friend was extremely pissed off, and left the store in a huff after buying his stuff.

While I love April Fool's Day, especially the French counterpart, Poisson d'Avril, where children hang paper fishes on people's backs - this brings back fond memories of my French class and I visiting our previous French teachers and mobbing them with paper fish - sometimes, people can take hoaxes a little too far. I was looking at an article about famous April Fool's Day Hoaxes, and the one of the top hoaxes recorded in the Museum of Hoaxes is one done by the BBC news show Panorama. In 1957, they showed announced that Swiss farmers had experienced a bumper crop of spaghetti, thanks to the mild winter, and the elimination of the dreaded "spaghetti weevil". This was accompanied by footage of Swiss farmers pulling strands of spaghetti out of trees. Huge numbers of people were taken in by this, and called the BBC news stations, trying to find out how they could grow their own spaghetti trees. BBC diplomatically replied to this questions by saying they should place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce, and to hope for the best. I personally enjoy a really good hoax, as long as the hoax doesn't hurt anyone, either physically, or by making fun of them.

Reading April Fool's Day hoaxes made me curious about the origin of April Fool's Day. I did some research and found out that ancient cultures used to celebrate New Year's on or around April 1st. After Pope Gregory XIII introduced the Gregorian calender which replaced the Julian calender, New Years was supposed to be celebrated on January 1st. However, many people continued to celebrate on April 1st, and so people made fun of them, and sent them on fool's quests, or trying to trick them into believing falsehoods. This practice spread around the world, thus starting April Fool's Day. I think it's really interesting to look into the background of such a famous day, since most people know about the day, but don't really think or know about the background of this day.