The French claim authorship of April Fools’ Day, dating it to the late Middle Ages. Back then, those who celebrated the year’s beginning on 1 January under the new Julian Calendar made fun of those who still went by the old one. A paper fish was attached to the unsuspecting backs of Gregorian diehards and the festival became known as Poisson d’Avril. The joke has been somewhat lost in the intervening centuries, denoting either the start of the fishing season, the astrological symbol for late March, or some play on the phrase ‘taking the bait’.
The era of mass media has seen many of us become April Fools (or fish). While my family and I were living in Lausanne, Switzerland, La Feuille d’Avis de Lausanne always came up with a spectacular front-page April Fools’ joke, fooling us and most of the canton de Vaud. One of the best was a headline announcing that an Italian company was planning to install a revolving restaurant on the top of their side of the Matterhorn, complete with an engineer’s drawing.
The outcry at this desecration of this most sacred Alp was, apparently, countrywide.
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