Are you sure you’re reading this right? It’s April Fools’ Day.
It’s celebrated around the world in many different ways, but in any way it is observed, someone has to play the fool.
In the Philippines, as in Spain and Mexico, there is a Yuletide version of April Fools’ Day — Niños Inocentes, the Feast of the Holy Innocents, as we call it, or Dia de los Santos Inocentes as it is for the Spanish and the Mexicans. It’s celebrated every year on Dec. 28 in remembrance of the massacre of the newborns and the firstborns in Bethlehem by order of King Herod of Judea in reaction to a prophecy that, the King of the Jews thus born, one of those children could oust him.
Through the years, the commemoration of this biblical tragedy has not been as grim, being part of a festive season. An angel warned Joseph, who brought his family, the Virgin Mary and the Infant Jesus, to safety in Egypt before the massacre took place, so the joke was on Herod. He played the fool and so the day, much like its April counterpart, has since become a day of pranks, the day revelers try to find someone, a friend or family member, to play Herod, the fool.
Niños Inocentes is All Fools Day in December, replete with spoof reports and lots of humor in the newspapers and the news channels in most Spanish-speaking countries, where the jokes are called “inocentadas.” Until the 1980s, Filipinos would avoid lending anything, especially money, on Dec. 28 because chances were they would never get it back.
Today is All Fools’ Day in April and in most countries, this is the day to play pranks on unsuspecting folk. No one knows exactly where it originated. There have been suggestions that it might have been prompted by reactions to the Edict of Rousillon, promulgated by Charles IX in 1564, to change the date of the New Year from Easter to Jan. 1 throughout Christendom. Those who failed to see that Easter was lunar — meaning falling on “the first Sunday after the full moon that occurs on or after the spring equinox” — and therefore a moveable feast were subsequently called poisson d’avril or April fools.
Once upon a time, All Fools Day was a big deal.
In 1957, the BBC played a spoof documentary of a family in Ticino in Switzerland harvesting strands of spaghetti from a tree, like grape from a vine, to which Americans reacted with as much incredulity as with great interest, wanting, as the BBC has put it, “to find out where they could purchase their very own spaghetti bush.”
In the mid-1990s, Taco Bell took out full-page ads in seven leading American newspapers to announce that, in the hope of helping the US reduce its debt, it had purchased the Liberty Bell and renamed it the Taco Liberty Bell, eliciting thousands of calls, many from irate citizens, for both Taco Bell and the National Park Service, before it was revealed at noon on April 1, 1996 that it was all a hoax. The ad won many awards.
Those days are gone. Nowadays, we potentially play the fool every time news on the web astounds us. The internet has ruined All Fools Day — or made it every day.