Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me annually, it’s a holiday. This year, Easter and April Fools Day coincide making things like Easter Snipe Hunts something to be on the lookout for. I always post on Sunday and, although the reasons are somewhat different, Easter always happens on Sunday. That means there have been several Easter anchored posts in the past. Despite them all being pretty shallow, I’ll post links at the end of this article.

April Fools Day is a different matter. This is only the second time in the life of this blog that April Fools Day has fallen on Sunday. The first time, in 2012, I attempted a joke, Product Review – Dial2Text, but it received virtually no attention. So, no joke this year. Instead, I looked into the history of the prankish holiday.

Like so many of our holidays, including the currently coinciding Easter, April Fools Day has several possible origins. My personal favorite involves the change from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar that started back in 1582. The change didn’t happen instantly. After Italy, France, and several other countries made the switch, 344 years passed before Turkey fell in line in 1926. Others switched at various points in between with England and her colonies, including those in North America, adopting the no-longer-very-new calendar in 1752. Depending on when the switch was made, 10 to 13 days had to be eliminated to get into sync. A more detailed description of the process is available here.

The Gregorian calendar places the start of the year at January 1. Prior to the switch, most Europeans considered a new year to begin at the Catholic Feast of the Annunciation on March 25. For some, this was a week long celebration which meant the party didn’t wrap up until April 1. The theory goes that, like folks who get to work an hour late when Daylight Savings Time kicks in, some people failed to adjust to the new calendar and continued to think of the first of April as the start of a year. They were laughed at and called April Fools by those more in tune with the times. I also suspect there were those who celebrated both dates and thought everyone else fools for missing out on half of the partying.

Of course, not everyone buys into this theory and some point to what may or may not be references to April 1 foolishness made well before 1582. Read some other theories and other details about the day here and here.

If the calendar story is true (and I really hope it is), then modern day April Fools differ greatly from the originals. People who celebrated a new year at the wrong time did it on their own and those who laughed at them were just enjoying the goof. Today it’s all about intentionally making others look foolish. The transition happened a long time ago. The image at the top of this article shows a “ticket” to see the non-existent “Annual Ceremony of Washing the Lions” at the Tower of London. It’s dated 1856 and there are records of the prank being played — probably without tickets — as early as 1698. Once everybody got on board with the January New Year thing, waiting for something like another calendar change to watch large groups of people do something dumb just wasn’t acceptable. Pranks, both big and small, quickly became the order of the day.

I’ll be on my guard, of course. There’s no way I’ll go looking for a left handed monkey wrench or polka dot paint… again. My only concern is whether or not I’ll be able to distinguish the snipe eggs from the bunny eggs.

Easter posts:
2012 East, Easter, Eastest
2013 Happy Eostre
2014 Must Be the Season of the Fish
2015 A Special Day
2016 Happy Easter Island
2017 Happy Easter Island (redux)

This post first appeared last year. I’ve brought it back, with date appropriate updates, due to its uncommon concentration of useful historic facts.

 
Two years ago I noted with surprise that Easter and my birthday have coincided only twice in my lifetime. But it has happened several times outside of my lifetime and that includes 1722 when Dutch sailor Jacob Roggeveen came upon a tiny South Pacific island which the residents may have called Rapa. Whether they did or didn’t mattered not a bit to Roggeveen who decided to call the island Paaseiland. Dutch Paaseiland translates to the English Easter Island. The island is now part of Spanish speaking Chili where it is known as Isla de Pascua. Its modern Polynesian name is Rapa Nui.

The opening image is the Isla de Pascua flag. The red figure represents a reimiro, an ornament worn by the native islanders. At left is an image more commonly associated with Easter Island. The island contains nearly 900 statues similar to the one in the picture. I’ve never been to Easter Island and have no pictures of my own although there are plenty to be found around the internet. This photo is one I took of an imitation at the Hill County Arts Foundation near Ingram, Texas.

The true significance of the statues, called moai, is not known but we do know that they once outnumbered inhabitants by roughly 8 to 1. The island is believed to have once held about 15,000 people. A number of factors reduced that to maybe 3,000 by the time Roggeveen came along. Contributing causes were deforestation, erosion, and the extinction of several bird species. The population probably remained around 3,000 until 1862 when Peruvian slavers began a series of raids that resulted in about half of that population being hauled away. The raiders were somehow forced to return many or perhaps most of those they had captured but they brought smallpox to the island when they did. Tuberculosis arrived just a few years later and disease, violent confrontations, and a major evacuation reduced the human population to just 111 by the late 1870s. There are currently 887 moai on the island. In the past there may have been more.

Today is the 296th Easter Sunday that Easter Island has been known by that name. The population has grown considerably and is now around 6000 which must make for a much happier island than when barely a hundred hung on. Of course the actual calendar date of the naming (and my birthday) passed more than a week ago. I hope everyone remembered to wish their friends and family a Happy Easter Island Anniversary.