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“April showers bring May flowers…”
by Sandy Baer
August is the only month without a holiday but April celebrates several beginning with All Fools Day on April 1. How did this rather odd tradition begin? After all most holidays commemorate a hero or religious events, not foolishness. The history of All Fools Day is as strange as the practice of playing tricks on friends and family.
There are conflicting explanations but the most widely accepted traces April Fool’s Day to 16th century France when in 1564 King Charles IX declared that his country was switching from the previously used Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar. Rather than observing the New Year around April, New Year’s Day shifted to January 1. But some people did not accept this change and it was these people who were mocked as fools for celebrating the New Year on the wrong date.
This was particularly true in rural France as news did not travel at today’s gigabyte speed and it might have been months or even years before everyone learned of the calendar change. These people became the butt of jokes. Uncertain as to why, a common one was to hook a cardboard fish to a person’s back. For uncertain reasons today, people in France who are fooled on April 1 are called “Poisson d’Avril”, which literally means the “April Fish”. When Napoleon married Marie-Louis of Austria on April 1, 1810, he earned the moniker “Poisson d’Avril”.
In Denmark just five years earlier, Hans Christian Anderson was born on April 1, 1805. He wrote more than 150 fairytales so if you are not inclined to pranks, read Cinderella to celebrate April. Another literary hero born in April (23/1564) was William Shakespeare if you prefer sonnets to fairytales. It is of note that Shakespeare died on his birthday in 1616. Famous Americans born in April include Washington Irving, Dorothea Dix, Henry Clay, Butch Cassidy, Thomas Jefferson, Clarence Darrow, and Babe Ruth as well as Emmylou Harris, Alec Baldwin, Wayne Newton, Collin Powell, David Letterman and Doris Day.
It was on April 3, 1860, that the first Pony Express rider left St. Joseph, MO with the mail but it was not until April 6, 1909, that Robert E. Perry and his party of explorers reached the North Pole. April appears to be a month for adventure as Paul Revere made his midnight ride to warn the Americans that the British were coming on April 18, 1775.
Not only is the second week of April designated as National Gardening Week, Earth Day is April 22. Senator Gaylord Nelson spearheaded a “national conservation tour” with President John F. Kennedy in the 1960’s to raise environmental issues to the political limelight. It was not until 1970 that a grassroots protest led by Nelson formally established “Earth Day”. Nelson first conceived the idea for “Earth Day” after visiting Santa Barbara and witnessing the devastation from a horrific oil spill off the Central Coast in 1969.
So celebrate April and plant a garden, clean up a beach and our world will be better every day. No fooling.
