“April Fools” Day .. How did this “satirical” celebration start and spread around the world?

The majority of the world’s population celebrates April Fools’ Day on the first of the month every year, when the day is usually full of satirical lies and unique pranks, without any feeling of guilt.

And unlike Halloween, April Fools’ Day has a relatively uncertain derivation. Stories regarding its beginning vary, from a holiday cited in the Canterbury Tales of Chaucer in 1392 to the mention of Poisson d’avril (April Fools, literally “April Fish”) by the French poet Eloi Damerval in 1508.
The first confirmed mention of the event did not appear in English until 1686 although it is likely that the day itself was celebrated a few years earlier.

The most plausible explanation for the origin of this day seems to be the story that some countries adopted the Gregorian calendar earlier than others, and thus celebrated the New Year on January 1 instead of March 25 according to the previous calendar. According to the old calendar, New Year’s celebrations end on April 1st. The story goes that the non-French (and thus the less civilized of the era) who continued to celebrate the old calendar were ridiculed and considered fools and therefore, they were called “poisson d’avril” in colloquial French which translates to “April Fools” today.

There are a number of other possible derivations, including that a Roman festival of hilaria (an ancient Roman religious ritual) was held on March 25, with the celebration ending on April 1. But there appears to be very little link between the celebration of this festival during the Roman Empire and the rise of April Fools’ Day in the late Renaissance.

Whatever the exact origin of April Fools’ Day, for some reason, it seemed that American society and Northern Europe needed to celebrate fools with the onset of spring.

Once April Fools’ Day became part of the popular calendar, North Americans and British took it eagerly, resulting in many expressions associated with this day.
The “fool mission” and “wild geese hunt” appear to be among the most common rituals performed during the April Fools’ Day in the late 18th century.

The twentieth century combined mass communication with more sophisticated banter and led to some notable April Fools’ Day jokes.

In 1957, the BBC broadcast a story about a plant that had grown from the then-new dish of “spaghetti”, prompting viewers to inquire of the broadcaster about information on how to obtain seedlings and seeds of the spaghetti plant. Information contained in the documentary.

A Swiss news program published the story of an initiative to clean up the Alps, to the dismay of viewers. In 1989, a comedy show showed fake news announcing the collapse of the Space Needle Tower (a landmark in the Pacific Northwest, which is a symbol of the American city of Seattle, Washington). The sitcom was widely endorsed and an on-air apology was required shortly thereafter.

Recently, companies such as Microsoft and Google sent comprehensive notes indicating not to participate, either formally or informally, in their headquarters or on social media associated with the name of these companies. “The data tells us that these stunts have limited positive impact and can actually lead to unwanted news cycles,” said Chris Capucela, Microsoft’s chief marketing officer.

Although Google is known to usually participate in April Fools’ Day dumps every year, it canceled the event for the second year in a row, as the first gesture was in 2000 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and instead urged employees to contribute to relief efforts.

Source: Forbes