Today is April 1st. Billions of people worldwide will play pranks on each other. Companies will release fake products. News outlets will publish fake stories. Your coworker will put googly eyes on everything in the break room fridge. Somewhere, right now, someone is wrapping a colleague's desk in aluminum foil.
Nobody knows why.
Not "nobody agrees on the origin." Not "scholars debate the source." Nobody knows. It is the only mainstream holiday on the planet with no confirmed origin, no founding myth, no religious basis, no government decree, no founder, and no one to blame.
Christmas has the nativity. Easter has the resurrection (and the Nicene Council in 325 AD arguing about the moon). Halloween has Samhain. Valentine's Day has Saint Valentine (probably). Thanksgiving has the Pilgrims (sort of). Every major holiday has at least a story, even if the story is half-fabricated.
April Fools' Day has nothing. Just vibes and fish.
We decided to investigate. We went looking for the origin of April Fools' Day the way an archaeologist goes looking for a lost city: expecting to find something, hoping it would be interesting, and prepared for the possibility that the whole thing was a myth.
Here's what we found. Which is: not much.
The Theories, Ranked by Plausibility
We found six major theories for where April Fools' Day came from. We're rating each one honestly.
The Origin Theories: A Scorecard
1. The Calendar Change (1564) | Verdict: PLAUSIBLE France moved New Year's Day from March 25/April 1 to January 1 via the Edict of Roussillon in 1564. People who didn't get the memo (or refused to switch) kept celebrating in spring and were mocked as "April fools." In France, pranksters stuck paper fish on their backs: "poisson d'avril" (April fish), because they were as easy to catch as a gullible young fish. The problem: References to April pranking exist from 1508 and 1561, before the calendar switch. The holiday predates its own most popular origin story.
2. Roman Hilaria (March 25) | Verdict: POSSIBLE The ancient Roman festival of Hilaria celebrated the resurrection of Attis (consort of the goddess Cybele) on the spring equinox. Participants wore disguises, mocked citizens and magistrates, reversed social hierarchies, and generally behaved like a city that declared a municipal prank day. March 25 was called "the eighth of the Calends of April," linking it to April 1. The problem: No text connects Hilaria to April Fools' Day. The festival died with Rome. 1,000 years of silence is a big gap. (We covered Hilaria in the spring equinox article.)
3. The Feast of Fools (Medieval) | Verdict: POSSIBLE BUT WRONG MONTH A medieval Christian festival (roughly December 28 to January 1) where low-ranking clergy parodied Mass, mocked bishops, elected fake popes, and generally inverted every hierarchy the Church spent the rest of the year enforcing. Eventually banned. Similar in spirit but held in winter, not spring. The problem: Wrong month entirely. Same energy, different date.
4. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1392) | Verdict: PROBABLY NOT In the Nun's Priest's Tale, a rooster is tricked on a date some readers calculate as April 1 ("32 days since March began"). Scholars now believe this is a medieval scribe's copying error and the original text pointed to May 2. The problem: A typo is not an origin story.
5. The 1561 Flemish Poem | Verdict: THE ONLY HARD EVIDENCE Eduard de Dene wrote a poem in 1561 about a nobleman sending his servant on a series of ridiculous, pointless errands on April 1. The servant eventually realizes they're "fool's errands." This is the earliest clear, unambiguous, documented reference to April 1 being a day for fooling people. The problem: It describes the tradition but doesn't explain where it came from. It's a snapshot, not a birth certificate.
6. Noah Sent the Dove Too Early (Bible) | Verdict: DEFINITELY NOT The claim that Noah sent his dove out on April 1 before the floodwaters receded, making the dove the first "April fool," has zero biblical support. It was fabricated in the 19th century. Zero scholarly backing. Zero.
What the Rest of the World Does
The strangest thing about April Fools' Day isn't that nobody knows where it came from. It's that dozens of cultures independently developed their own versions.
France: "Poisson d'Avril" (April Fish). The classic. You stick a paper fish on someone's back without them noticing. When they finally discover it, you yell "Poisson d'avril!" Children do it to teachers. Adults do it to colleagues. The entire country becomes a stealth fish delivery system for 24 hours.
United Kingdom: Pranks must stop at noon. If you prank someone after 12 PM, YOU become the April Fool. This is the most British rule in the history of rules: even chaos has a schedule.
Scotland: They get TWO days. Day one is "Hunt the Gowk" (gowk = cuckoo, a bird associated with foolishness). You send someone on a fake errand carrying a sealed note that says "send the gowk to another gowk." Day two is "Tailie Day," devoted entirely to pinning things to people's backsides. Scotland invented the "kick me" sign.
Iran: Sizdah Be-dar. The 13th day of the Persian New Year (Nowruz), falling on April 1 or 2. People spend the day outdoors, play pranks, and tell lies. This predates any European tradition by centuries.
Brazil: "Dia da Mentira" (Day of the Lie). Same concept, Portuguese flavor. News outlets compete to publish the most believable fake story.
India: While not April Fools' specifically, the Holi festival (ending March 31) involves color-throwing, role reversal, and general mischief that rhymes with the same spring-prank energy.
The Greatest Hoaxes in April Fools' History
1957: BBC Spaghetti Harvest. The BBC aired a segment showing Swiss farmers harvesting spaghetti from trees. Millions of viewers believed it. Hundreds called the BBC asking how to grow their own spaghetti tree. The BBC told them to "place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best." This remains the gold standard of media pranks.
1996: Taco Bell Buys the Liberty Bell. Taco Bell took out a full-page ad in The New York Times announcing it had purchased the Liberty Bell and renamed it the "Taco Liberty Bell." The White House press secretary was asked about it. He said the Lincoln Memorial had also been sold and was now the "Ford Lincoln Mercury Memorial."
1998: Burger King Left-Handed Whopper. Burger King advertised a Whopper specifically designed for left-handed people, with condiments rotated 180 degrees. Thousands of customers specifically requested the left-handed version.
So What Is It, Really?
Here's the honest conclusion after looking at every theory, every culture, and every historical reference we could find:
April Fools' Day might be the most genuinely human holiday in existence.
It has no founder because nobody founded it. It has no sacred text because it doesn't need one. It has no government mandate because you can't legislate absurdity. It emerged independently across dozens of cultures, in different centuries, on different calendars, with different names and different rituals, all converging on the same idea: one day a year, be ridiculous.
The trickster archetype is universal. Loki (Norse). Hermes (Greek). Coyote (Indigenous American). Anansi (West African). Sun Wukong (Chinese). Maui (Polynesian). Every culture on Earth has a divine figure whose job is to break rules, expose pretension, and remind the serious and the powerful that they're ridiculous too. April Fools' Day might be the one day we collectively let that archetype out of the story and into the streets.
We wrote an entire article about how Easter is calculated down to the Nicene Council's lunar tables. We traced the 13-month calendar back through the Gregorian reform to ancient Egypt. We can tell you exactly why December 25 drifted from the winter solstice and why the Ethiopian calendar still has 13 months.
But April Fools' Day? The best we've got is a Flemish poem from 1561 about a guy being sent on stupid errands.
Maybe that's the point. Maybe the greatest prank in history is that the prank holiday has no origin. It just appeared. Nobody started it. Nobody can stop it. And if you think too hard about why it exists, you become the April fool.
"The first of April is the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year." Mark Twain said that, and whether he actually said it or someone attributed it to him because that's what the internet does, the point stands.
Happy April Fools' Day. Nobody knows why it exists. Nobody can stop it. And this article might be a prank.
(It's not. But you'll wonder.)
The Trickster Gods: Every Culture Has One
Loki (Norse) deceives gods and giants, causes Ragnarok. Hermes (Greek) steals Apollo's cattle on the day he's born. Coyote (Indigenous American) creates the world through accidents and tricks. Anansi (West African) outsmarts everyone through stories. Sun Wukong (Chinese) fools heaven itself. Maui (Polynesian) tricks the sun into slowing down. The trickster is the only archetype that appears in literally every mythology on Earth. April Fools' Day might be the one day we let the trickster out.
