One day, I thought "hey, what is the deal with April 1st anyway ?" And so I go to a couple of websites (fine, a website) to find out.
Fascinatingly, a lot of people don't even know how the widely practiced pranks-day started. But dig this. There are a couple of theories about its history of development..
THEORY 1
It came from France. Specifically 16th century France. During that time , a calendar different than our current one was used. The Julian calendar it was called. Apparently, in that calendar , new year starts on April 1st, not January 1st. Anyhow, later , someone called King Charles IX would declared that France would start using the Gregorian calendar, which puts new year's day on the first of January.
It was around this time that the April Fool's started. Why? During this time,not everyone agreed to the time-shift. Some believed that the time should not be changed at all. These guys became one of the first people to be the butt of April's Fool. They were pranked at and invited to bogus parties. Sadly, rural folks also got hit by this new event. But they were "pulled by their legs" because the news of the date and time shift had not reached them yet. And so , they were mocked and made fun of when they celebrated new year on the wrong date.
Nowadays, those pranks-victims in France are known as "Poisson d'Avril" which literally means "April Fish"
THEORY 2
Coincidentally, April Fool's Day is celebrated in conjuction with two other celebrations. In ancient Rome, on the same day as April Fool's , a festival called Hilaria was celebrated. The function of this celebration was to celebrate the resurrection of the god , Attis. Hilaria is probably the base word for hilarious or hilarity. On another note, there was this invention during Wolrd War II with a "hilarity" word in it. Although I don't think it's funny, considering its function. The invention was a minesweeper named "USS Hilarity (AM-241) ". Regarding Hilaria, nowadays it is known as Roman Laughing Day. That aside, a couple, if not a few, kilometres away, India celebrated the Holi festival , in which a part is cracking jokes and smearing each other faces with colours.
Since there is no connection between the current April Fool's with these two ancient festivals, the first theory is accepted by most historians.
