What activities are held on April Fool’s Day in the West? How is April Fool’s Day celebrated in the West?
When celebrating April Fool’s Day in Western countries, people often organize family gatherings and decorate the room with daffodils and daisies. . The typical traditional method is to decorate a fake environment. You can decorate the room like Christmas. You can also decorate it like New Year. When guests come, you wish them "Merry Christmas" or "Happy New Year", which is very exciting. Feel chic and fun.
Most American families hold fish feasts on the holiday. The host sends invitations to guests before the festival, and the invitations are usually small colorful fish made of cardboard. The dining table is decorated with green and white colors. There are fish tanks and small and exquisite fishing rods in the middle. Each fishing rod is tied with a green streamer, and there is a gift for the guests, a delicate celluloid fish, or a bag full of candies. fish basket. It goes without saying that all the dishes at the fish feast are made of fish. There is also a custom of making fake dishes at April Fool's Day parties. Someone once described a typical April Fool's Day recipe: first a "salad" with lettuce leaves sprinkled with green pepper, but when the leaves were uncovered, it turned out to be an oyster cocktail underneath; the second course was "roasted potatoes." , actually underneath were sweet bread crumbs and fresh mushrooms; the dishes that followed included roast chicken disguised as crabmeat and raspberry ice cream buried under a tomato salad. After the meal, guests can also enjoy candy from the pill box.
However, the most typical activity of April Fool's Day is that everyone makes fun of each other and teases each other with lies.
In the UK, when people have fooled someone and the other person is still confused, they shout "April Fool". According to research by folklorists, in the UK and other countries where holiday traditions originate from the UK, pranks can only last until 12 noon that day. If you still play tricks on people after noon, you will become an "April fool". In Scotland, people used to call April Fool's Day "cuckoo day". The word "cuckoo" in Scots means fool.
In some areas of France, Italy and Belgium, people like to secretly stick a paper fish behind other people's backs on this day and shout "April's silly fish". In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many April Fool's Day postcards featured the image of this fish.
In Poland, April Fool's Day is full of all kinds of jokes. Not only ordinary people play pranks on each other, but also the media and some public institutions also join in the prank. On that day, Poles generally avoided holding important events. An alliance was concluded in Poland on April 1, 1683. In order to avoid the "sensitive" day of April 1, the contracting date was moved forward by one day, to March 31.
In which country is April Fool's Day a holiday?
There are two theories: one is that it originated in Spain, and the other is that it originated in France.
There is a theory about the origin of April Fool's Day related to Noah's Ark. According to Western legend, one thousand six hundred and fifty years after the birth of Adam, the ancestor of mankind, God poured a large amount of floods into the world in the hope of destroying the world. However, Noah, a descendant of Adam's third son Huide, secretly built a large ship to save the lives of his family. After the raging flood receded, although there was no danger to life, there was no land to board. So Noah sent out a white dove, hoping that the white dove would find a piece of land exposed after the flood disappeared, but to no avail. Because according to legend, this day is April 1st, so later people believed that doing something meaningless on this day is like sending a dove to find land, which is very stupid. This is another origin of April Fool's Day. statement.
The last legend related to the origin of April Fool's Day is related to Batman. Of course it's just related to the place names in Batman. It is said that there was a king in the 13th century who was so greedy that all the land he visited became his own, and everyone else who passed by had to pay money. But there was a town called Gotham, and they didn't want to lose their main road, so they spread rumors that it was an ominous place. The king heard about it and sent people to Gotham Town to investigate. It turned out that the streets of Gotham Town were full of crazy people, so the king canceled the inspection plan here. It happened to be April 1st when people in Gotham Town pretended to be crazy and stupid, so it became the origin of April Fools' Day.