April Fools’ Day has been around since at least 1582. That’s when France switched from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar. Before that time, the New Year was celebrated for eight days, until April 1. But when the Gregorian calendar became official, New Year’s Day became January 1.
Back then, news traveled slowly and many people didn’t know about the change for several years. Others, although they knew, resisted the change and continued to celebrate the New Year on April 1 as they always had. Both the ignorant and the traditional groups were mocked and labeled “fools.” They were often sent to “run errands” and were the victims of other practical jokes.
This light-hearted harassment slowly turned into a prank tradition on the first day of April. You might want to take a look at The Museum of Hoaxes’ “Top 100 April Fools’ Hoaxes of All Time,” which includes two worth mentioning. Prior to April 1, 2000, a Dutch IPO was announced. He raised $7 million before the hoax was revealed. Four years earlier, in 1997, there was a worldwide request for everyone to go offline from March 31 to April 2 to allow “five very powerful multilingual Internet crawling robots built in Japan (Toshiba ML-2274) located around the world” to clean the Internet of all the “floating debris” that had accumulated, purging it of dead email addresses and inactive ftp, www and gopher sites.
The Bible says, “Like a madman who shoots firebrands or deadly arrows is the man who deceives his neighbor and says, ‘I was only joking!'” (Proverbs 26:18-19). It’s better to find other ways to have fun or even gloss over the humor than to laugh at the expense of others. Some people’s self-esteem just can’t afford to take a hit. Or if you must laugh, choose your victim carefully. The Bible warns that you are playing with fire, and fire has a way of getting out of control.