![]() If you were fortunate to join us on our funny webinar a while back, you know humor is important to a healthy workplace culture. ![]() ![]() But, that doesn’t mean you still can’t have a little fun in the workplace-especially on April Fool’s Day. Unfortunately, if you work in a hybrid or remote workplace you will need to be a little more creative. Truly, advice to take throughout the year.It's that time of year again where it is acceptable to shrink wrap a colleague's desk, stuff your boss's desk full of balloons, or rearrange the keys on a coworker’s keyboard. However, research did turn up a fantastic parting phrase for prankers: Prima Aprilis, uważaj, bo się pomylisz! (April Fools’ Day, be careful - you can be wrong!) Prima Aprilis, or April 1, goes about the same in Poland as it does in any other pro-April-Fools’ place. In Poland, they always have the last word If you don’t get gowked, there’s always an opportunity for humiliation the next day, which is “Tailie Day.” Tailie Day is for largely harmless derrière-related pranks, like pinning a tail on someone or sticking a sign on their back. “Gowk” is term for a type of bird, but is also slang for “fool,” and on this day, pranking Scots send unsuspecting gowks (the people, not the birds) on fool’s errands just to waste their time. First, there’s Hunt the Gowk Day, which actually isn’t as ominous as it sounds. ![]() Oh, is one April Fools’ Day not enough? Historically, in Scotland, they stretch the torture/festivities out over two days. It’s also considered a spring festival, which ties in to some other April Fool’s predecessors, like the ancient Roman celebration of Hilaria. Sizdah Bedar, which is said to have been celebrated as far back as the 5th century BC, is translated as “getting rid of 13,” so it has an appropriately superstitious air. It’s celebrated on the thirteenth day of the Persian New Year (are you sensing a pattern here?), on April 1 or 2. Iran could boast the oldest April Fools’ traditions with its observance of Sizdah Bedar, which also has a prank-playing element. In one part of Spain, they throw a food fightĪn Iranian young woman puffs on a hookah as she and her family sit together in a park in northern Tehran during the day of Sizdah Bedar, also known as Nature's Day, on April 2, 2022. In Brazil, however, April 1 is still the prank day of choice, and they cut straight to the chase by calling it “ Dia das Mentiras,” or “Day of Lies.” So for those cultures, the day to watch out for is December 28. Much of Latin America celebrates “El Dia de los Inocentes,” or “ Day of the Innocents,” a late December Catholic feast with extremely un-silly origins that somehow became a day of jokes and pranks. In Latin America, you have a few chances to be pranked If you really want to go down an April Fools’ rabbit hole, one apocryphal origin theory suggests that when France switched from the Julian calendar to the current Gregorian calendar in the 1500s, people thought it would be funny to jokingly celebrate the old “New Year’s” and make fun of people who forgot the change. Interestingly enough, fish are also considered a lucky symbol in many areas of the world, and are important in a lot of New Year’s traditions. This harmless bit of mischief is accompanied by the phrase “Poisson d’Avril” which means, of course, “April Fish.” As one French site noted, it’s not exactly the latest trend or anything, but if people are charitable, maybe they’ll give you a half-hearted laugh for your efforts. In France, a longstanding tradition is to stick paper fish on other people’s backs, kind of like an elevated “kick me” sign. While the origins of April Fools’ Day aren’t unanimously known, historians are pretty certain Ancient Romans, Western Europeans and people from the British Isles had a lot to do with it. Two brothers sticking April Fools' Day fish on each other's backs on April 1, 1963.
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