Tuesday, April 1, 2008

HAPPY NEW YEAR…PSYCH!

"This is the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on the other three-hundred and sixty-four."-Mark Twain

I would have never realized how lame the origin of April Fool's Day was unless I read it for myself. I always pictured April Fool's to have started because of some kind of crazy act, like the British aristocracy releasing plagued rats into a peasant's house as a lark or a French King maybe inviting a peasant to dine with his royalty only to send him to the guillotine. You know, something lighthearted. But sadly my findings just brought me back to the Christian church, the calendar and that damn vernal equinox. Oh yeah...and let us not forget…the French.

Basically, Julius Caesar's calendar (the Julian Calendar) had a few flaws to it that screwed up the timing of Easter and the vernal equinox. So in 1582, Pope Gregory XIII ordered a new calendar cleverly titling it, the Gregorian Calendar. This is the calendar that we know and live by today. Pope G's decree was that New Year's Day would be celebrated on Jan. 1st, not April 1st. (Technically it was March 25 but the celebration lasted from then until the beginning of April. They knew how to party back then.) In France, apparently not everyone got the memo and this led to some confusion and people celebrating New Year's on the wrong day. (insert laugh track here) The ones who made the mistake were laughed at by their peers and had dead fish sneakily placed on their backs. Seriously. The French can be so cruel!!

2 comments:

sue said...

eagle: thanks, I needed that ( by the way, what was it )

eagle said...

it is a clip from Monty Python and the Holy Grail...A MUST SEE. So stop what you are doing right now and go see it. GO. NOW. I mean it.