Every year someone tries to convince you that Starbucks is launching a pickle latte. Or that your favorite band broke up. You fall for it, or you don’t, and then everyone laughs and forgets about it until next year.

But here’s the thing. Nobody actually knows where this holiday started. And for a day built entirely on lying, that feels weirdly appropriate.

The Calendar Theory

The most popular explanation takes us back to France in 1564. Before then, the new year was celebrated sometime in late March or early April, loosely tied to the spring equinox. Then King Charles IX signed a decree moving it to January 1st.

News traveled slow. Like, really slow. No phones, no newspapers, nothing. So a lot of people in rural France kept celebrating the new year in the spring, either because they genuinely hadn’t heard, or because they just didn’t care what the king said. Those people got mocked. They got pranked. Kids stuck paper fish to their backs.

The French still do that today. They call it “poisson d’avril.” April fish. Kids tape little paper fish to each other’s backs every April 1st, and they’ve been doing it for over 450 years.

It Might Go Back Even Further

Some historians think the whole thing predates the French calendar drama by centuries.

There’s Hilaria (yes, that’s where we get the word ‘hilarious’), a Roman festival celebrated at the end of March. People wore disguises, mocked strangers in the street, and generally caused chaos in honor of the goddess Cybele. Chaotic, playful, a little unhinged. The energy is familiar.

There’s also a theory about the weather. Early spring is unpredictable. Those of us in the Black Hills know this better than most. You’re in a t-shirt on Tuesday, shoveling six inches of snow on Thursday, and somehow surprised by both. Some researchers think people started pranking each other partly as a response to that kind of seasonal chaos, a “well, if nature’s going to mess with us, we might as well mess with each other” mentality. It’s a stretch, maybe. But it makes a certain kind of sense.

Geoffrey Chaucer gets pulled into this too. There’s a line in Canterbury Tales, written around 1392, that some scholars read as a reference to April 1 as a day of tricks. Others think that’s a misreading. Chaucer scholars have been arguing about it for decades and probably will be for decades more.

How It Spread

By the 1700s, Britain had picked it up. Scotland, never one to do things halfway, turned it into a two-day event. The second day was called Taily Day and was specifically about pranks involving people’s backsides. The “kick me” sign is a Scottish invention. You’re welcome, world.

The tradition crossed the Atlantic with European immigrants and slowly became part of American life, mostly through newspapers first, then radio, then television.

The Pranks That Actually Made History

This is the part worth knowing.

In 1957, the BBC aired a three-minute news segment about the “bumper spaghetti harvest” in Switzerland. Serious narrator. Footage of farmers pulling long strands of spaghetti from trees. Hundreds of viewers called in asking where they could buy their own spaghetti bush. The BBC told them to place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and “hope for the best.”

In 1998, Burger King ran a full-page ad in USA Today announcing the “Left-Handed Whopper,” designed with condiments rotated 180 degrees for left-handed customers. Thousands of people went in and asked for it by name. Thousands more specifically requested the right-handed version so they wouldn’t get the wrong one.

Taco Bell, in 1996, announced in several major newspapers that it had purchased the Liberty Bell and was renaming it the Taco Liberty Bell. The phone lines at the National Historic Park flooded. White House press secretary Mike McCurry told reporters the government was also considering selling the Lincoln Memorial to Ford Motor Company. He was clearly having a great time.

These weren’t little pranks. They were full campaigns. They worked because people trusted the institutions running them.

Why It Stuck Around

There’s something genuinely likable about this holiday. It’s one of the few days where being a little ridiculous is not just allowed but expected. A good prank, the kind where both people end up laughing, is weirdly intimate. You’re trusting someone enough to make them feel dumb for a second, and they trust you enough to laugh about it.

Maybe that’s why it survived. Centuries of calendar changes, religious shifts, wars, revolutions, and it’s still here.

Whether it started with a French king’s paperwork, a Roman street festival, or the general chaos of April weather, the impulse behind it has never really changed.

We like to fool each other. We like to laugh. Every April 1st, we get to do both.