I hate April Fools’ Day. I’m not alone, either — in fact, I’m probably among the majority of people. So why does such an unpopular holiday persist?
Well, it’s positively medieval, says Alex Boese, the curator of the museum of hoaxes. “One of the interesting things about the holiday is that you can go right back to the beginning of the earliest records of it, and people always hated it,” Boese says. “It's one of the least-liked holidays there is. There's a large group of people that just despise it. For literally centuries, people have been predicting that April Fools’ Day must be on its last legs, and surely this awful celebration is going to die out soon, but it just keeps on going.”
Boese isn’t a hoaxster himself, I should note — rather, he’s a cultural historian with an interest in folklore. And April Fools’ began as a folk holiday, though its most popular origin story is, fittingly, also a hoax. The faux-origin is French, and posits that the switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar confused some people, who could be tricked into celebrating the New Year on the wrong day. But references to April Fools’ Day predate the calendar change, Boese says. And those earliest references are Dutch, and they come as early as 1564, nearly two decades before Gregory introduced the new calendar in 1582. The Dutch version of the holiday was a “fools’ errand” day, encouraging the unwary to go gather — for instance — pigeon milk. It’s not certain the holiday is Dutch in origin, but since all the earliest references are from the Netherlands, we probably have them to thank for this tradition, Boese says.
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