It’s April Fools day, you are geared up and in full armour for school. Wary that all your friends might be up to trickery. “They won’t prank me today”, you say as you leave home. You rock up at school and there seems to be no one in sight in your class. “What has happened to everyone?” you think.
“Do I have the right class?” you wonder and as you turn around to leave, surprise! The whole class jumps out from all the corners of the classroom and scream. “You have been fooled!”
April Fools day is the best day to get up to foolishness. There is no other holiday that asks you to play tricks and to dupe your unsuspecting friends and family.
But then one wonders, who invented this day and why? Was it a bunch of clowns that didn’t have anything better to do or did people just decide to have a day in which they could celebrate being mischievous? Whatever the case might have been, here is a bit of history on the origins of this day.
The origins of April Fools’ Day are shrouded in mystery. It’s hard to tell which theories about the holiday are true and which are a prank of their own.
The earliest theory regarding the holiday’s beginnings was that it came from the 16th century. The French celebrated the new year just like we do today, except they partied on 1 April. In 1562, Pope Gregory changed the calendar to the one we use today and from then on, the new year began on 1 January.
Lots of people either didn’t know about the new calendar, or they ignored it and kept celebrating on 1 April. Everyone else called them April fools and played tricks on them.
April Fools’ Day is your yearly get-out-of-jail-free card to act impish without making people angry. Since your friends, family and co-workers will be on high-alert on 1 April, you’ll need to become a professional prankster to catch them off-guard. Lucky for you, we’ve put together a few pranks people pull on each other to make the day memorable. Read on and then get your prank on!
“Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” – Chinese Proverb
“Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them, the rest of us could not succeed.” – Mark Twain
“We’re fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance.” – Japanese Proverb
“Don’t give cherries to pigs or advice to fools.” – Irish Proverb
“If every fool wore a crown, we should all be kings.” – Welsh Proverb
• Add food colouring to milk that comes in a cardboard container.
• Bring multiple sets of clothes to class. Change every hour and act like nothing’s different.
• Hide food in a bin (make sure it’s clean) and when someone comes by, grab some and eat it.
• Leave a note on your teachers car apologising for an accident that never actually happened.
• At home, glue all the eggs into the carton box.
• Leave cryptic notes warning someone of an impending prank then do nothing all day.
• Switch your sibling’s lotion with mayonnaise so they smell like mayo.
• Get a TV remote, take out the batteries and stuff cotton or paper in it.
• Superglue money on the pavement outside your school, or at a cool spot that most of your classmates hang out, then watch them break fingernails to get the money.
• Call a friend, put on an accent and tell them they have won N$500 000 from a competition they entered.
• Turn your house upside down. Turn photos, toys, furniture, anything that works upside down the night before 1 April. See how your mom will react.
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