When I was a kid, April Fool’s Day made me slightly nervous, even though I enjoyed the chance to say “April Fool!” to someone if I could manage it. Although the pranks that I worried about would not have harmed me and never actually happened to me, they still loomed large in my mind. I heard about people switching the salt and sugar, rendering their victims’ food inedible. I feared buckets of water falling off doors onto me, although I’ve never seen or heard of that happening to anyone I know. When I was a teen, I was horrified by the story of parents who set clocks ahead, then woke their children at some ungodly hour and informed them they were late for school.
I’ve managed a few good pranks — none of them on April Fool’s Day — during my life, but what I was so proud of made others genuinely unhappy, even though the pranks were not that big a deal in my eyes. In college, I was left alone in the room of a friend who had an extensive collection of classical, jazz, and rock CDs. Bored, I came up with the idea of switching the disks around, but I decided that merely swapping disks would be too easy. I pulled several CDs from different genres and mixed them up so that you might find Beethoven in a Charlie Parker case, Charlie Parker in a Pink Floyd case, Pink Floyd in a U2 case, and U2 in a Beethoven case. I remember my friend telling me months later that he was still finding disks that were out of place. He didn’t sound amused; he sounded frustrated. I recently asked him how he felt about the prank, and he told me that it was a “monumental pain.”
Then there was the time my daughter asked me to check her boots for spiders. I reached in and let out a yelp, jerking my hand backward. Although I still smile when she brings it up, she didn’t find the prank funny. She told me that, for just a moment, she was scared that I was truly hurt.
I don’t mean to be Debbie Downer. It should be clear that I love pulling a good prank as much as the next person. And not all pranks are horrible. A friend told me that she felt amused and loved when her tree was TPed. But clearly some of the pranks I’ve taken great pride in are not remembered in the same way by my victims, so if you have any doubt at all about how someone will feel about a prank, it’s best not to try it.
I’d like to propose that we still celebrate April Fool’s Day, but reconsider who the fool is. What if we decided to engage in foolish play rather than trying to fool someone else? Remembering my own childhood anxiety over April Fool’s Day, I established April 1st as “Backwards Day” with my daughter. (I believe I got the idea from a book, but I can’t remember the source.) I woke her with a loving “good night” and then went through her bedtime routine with her, including a bedtime story. At breakfast time, I tried to serve foods that we would normally have for dinner, starting with dessert. Of course I served breakfast for dinner. I tucked my daughter in that evening with a “good morning.” Backwards Day wasn’t always easy to pull off. I returned to work full-time when she was three months old, so we usually had to fit our celebrations around work and daycare or school. Even more challenging, once she was in school we sometimes found ourselves visiting relatives on April 1st, since her spring break often fell around that time. While I could still wake her with a “good night” and read her a bedtime story before breakfast, I never felt comfortable asking family members to adjust their meals to fit our celebration.
My daughter came to really enjoy Backwards Day. We dropped it during her teen years, but it was a special part of her childhood. Given her reaction to my “spider in the boot” trick, I’m glad she has the memories of our silly celebrations on April 1st instead of “that time Mom woke me at 3:30 a.m. and told me I needed to hurry up and get ready for school.”
What can you do this year to make April 1st a day of silly, fun memories for everyone?