April Fools’ Day is celebrated in many countries on April 1st every year. The first I can remember is when I was a child and the BBC ran a very serious looking news item about spaghetti trees in Italy. Spaghetti was still quite a new item on the British menu and not many people actually knew where it came from, or that it was just a kind of pasta. Most newspapers, TV channels and other popular media run such jokes on April 1st, and it’s fun to try to spot the fake article.
This year, both YouTube and Gmail posted really well-made videos as an April tease.
According to Wikipedia: In Italy, France and Belgium, children and adults traditionally stick paper fishes on each other’s backs and shout “pesce d’aprile!, poisson d’avril! or aprilvis! (April fish) respectively. Such fish feature prominently on many French late 19th to early 20th century April Fools’ Day postcards. Many writers suggest that the when January 1st was restored, by Pope Gregory XIII in the 16th Century, as New Year’s Day of the Gregorian Calendar (New Year had previously been April 1st in the Julian calendar – and more logical in my opinion) – jokes were played on those members of the population slow, or unwilling, to catch up with the change.
