Originally posted on Myspace: http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendId=53935558&blogId=373001236#ixzz0zec1IHbN
So first day and I have to come up with something to be creative/informative about... Since its April Fools day I could tell you about some awesome April Fool’s day joke I pulled off.. however I haven’t ever pulled off an awesome one. But April Fool’s day did get me to thinking...
You know its kind of a dumb holiday really, if you have some awesome prank you should be able to pull it whenever you want (if its truly awesome, such as the MLB baseball team earlier this spring who convinced one of their younger players that he had been traded to a team in Japan and even had a fake news conference. ) April Fool’s day just pulls out the lame crap like "Ooo your shoes are untied" It just gives license to everyone to try and pull of some prank they think will be awesome. I’ll do admit some people pull of some pretty awesome April Fool’s day pranks, but I just don’t see why we need a special day for it. If the prank is good enough it’ll work any day of the year.
So I was going to look up the History of April Fools day for everyone, however its origins are unknown so I don’t have a definitive answer for everyone. In ancient history there were a lot of different celebrations in different cultures that celebrated days of trickery, including the Roman holiday of Saturnalia. Saturnalia was a big celebration that even had a pretend king ruling for the day, however, Saturnalia was celebrated in Winter and became New Years day with some of its typical practices becoming part of the Christmas tradition.
There are also theories proposed by some that the day stems back to the Biblical stories, one being that it comes from the day Noah released the Dove from the ark who returned with nothing. The theory that it was a fools errand. The second theory is it comes from the time when Jesus was sent from Pilate to Herod and then sent back again, because it became a common saying "Sending a man from Pilate to Herod" which meant to send someone on a fools errand. Neither of these seem that plausible to me at all.
There was the Day of Lud in the Celtic tradition was a celebration to the god of humor
In the Middle Ages in France there was the Festus Fatuorum or "Feast of Fools" which seems to be related to Saturnalia because the feaster elected a mock Pope for the day and mocked a lot of the Catholic rituals, so obviously this was highly discouraged by the Church. So after this tradition died down a lot of its supporters shifted to the celebration of Mardis Gras.
One of the most interesting stories I found was a British story about a town called Gotham, in which the legend exist that back in the 13th century and road the King walked on would become public property. The people of Gotham didn’t want to lose their main road through town that they privately owned, so when they heard the King was coming through their town they decided to refuse to let him enter. Obviously this upset the king and was a challenge to his power so he sent soldiers to the town, but when they arrived they found the town was full of crazy people who were spending their time with activities such as trying to drown fish or putting birds into cages with no top. According to the legend the King after hearing this report determined the citizens of the town were too crazy warrant punishment, so to this day April Fools Day is celebrated to celebrate their ability to fool the King by acting foolish.
One last theory to tell you about is what I believe is the most likely origin to April Fools Day. This theory is based on the changing of the calendar system in the late 1500’s, Before the Council of Trent most of Europe was on the Julian calendar established by the Roman empire, on which the New Year started at the end March and was celebrated for a week long period until the start of April. Well The Council of Trent developed the Gregorian calendar that we observe today, among other religious doctrines and decisions such as condemning Protestantism. Obviously those of us who have experienced the daylights savings time switch here in Indiana know people don’t react kindly to change of calendars/time. So when countries switched some people refused to accept it for awhile. This was most notably seen in France who was the first to switch, so while some people refused to switch and celebrated new years at the same time they always did the other people who did accept the switch made fun of them and played tricks on them such as sticking paper fish on their backs "Poisson d’Avril" meaning April Fish... (If you took French class with Mrs. Thackery you’ll remember this). So the idea is April Fool’s came from this.....
Anyway no one knows for sure so you’ll have to make up your own mind :)
Also I realize this isn’t the most "creative" way to kick off my challenge but hopefully you found it interesting and I promise to try and get more creative stuff up in the future, this just seemed like an ok starting point as a warm up :P
P.S. if you tried a "your shoes untied" joke today.... your lame :P
No comments:
Post a Comment