The Curiously Twisted History of April Fools Day

  

Trying to uncover the origins of April Fools' Day is quite a fool's errand in itself.

Some say it can be traced back to a Roman festival called Hilaria (as in “hilarious”). It was celebrated on the 8th day before the Kalends of April (March 25th). It was a day of light-hearted fun and masquerades.

There are many conflicting stories; this is touched upon in the following poem from the late 18th Century.

The first of April, some do say,
Is set apart for All Fools' Day.
But why the people call it so,
Nor I, nor they themselves do know.
But on this day are people sent
On purpose for pure merriment.--Poor Robin's Almanac (1790)


This then is the prevailing theory:
Over the years the calendar for the Western world has shifted considerably. The Romans originally had a ten-month calendar.

The truly creative names of the 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th months were: Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten. Or in Latin: Septem, Octo, Nove, Decem (September, October, November, December, duh.) Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar decided they wanted their own months and thus July and August were added. (In reality they bumped the months named Five and Six, Quintilis and Sextilis ( now that's a way cooler name than August.)

More important to our story is the fact that on the old calendar the New Year used to begin in spring. Made sense, new beginnings, crops coming alive.

So, in late March, or early April, folks had their New Year celebration. They'd run out into the fields making noise to scare the evil spirits from their emerging crops (and thus the New Year's noisemaker was born)

Folks followed Julius’s Julian calendar for ages.
Then, in 1562, Pope Gregory decided to introduce a new one for the Christian world. On the Gregorian calendar the New Year fell on January 1st. Initially, some folks stuck with the original date and had their parties in March and April. Eventually, the parties petered out.

Then those tricksters the French, come into the picture. Practical jokers in France began sending out invitations to fictitious New Year's Eve parties to be held on April 1st. If you showed up for one you were called an April Fish. Don't ask me why you were a fish; the French have some weird thing with food. Actually, one explanation is that an April Fish is a newly spawned fish, a naïve youngster susceptible to trickery-–easily caught.

In France today, April first is called "Poisson d'Avril" April Fish. French children fool their friends by taping a paper fish to their back. When the " fool" discovers the trick, the prankster yells "Poisson d'Avril!" April Fish! (A few years back, a friend thanked me for this post. He said he now understood why schoolmates back in Ohio taped paper fish on each other's backs on April 1st.)

The tradition spread to England and further.
In Scotland,the fool who is pranked is called a GOK, a slang word for a cuckoo bird. The day is called Tally Day and centers around keester kicking, putting “kick me” signs on people’s backs.In England the prankee is called a Gob or a Gobby.

All pranks are supposed to end by noon. Otherwise, the prankster will have bad luck for the “new year”. The fools who are pranked are supposed to accept the prank graciously; otherwise, they will have bad luck.

Historically, the media gets involved in pranks. Keep that in mind when you read the paper on today. The rather staid BBC, the British Broadcasting Corporation, pulled one of the most famous April Fools' pranks. In 1957 they ran a report of how in Italy, spaghetti is harvested from spaghetti trees. You can see this classic prank at:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/april/1/newsid_2819000/2819261.stm

One of the more famous American April Fools' pranks was pulled by Sports Illustrated in 1985 an expose of how the New York Mets had a pitcher in training camp who pitched barefoot and could sling a 106 mile an hour fastball. You can read the story at: www.strongmemories.com/toppage8.htm

So, if someone pulls an April Fools' trick on you
just remember the words of Mark Twain:

"The first of April is the day we remember
what we are the other 364 days of the year. "

Dano
Born in the month of Sextilis

McHistory --The Curiously Twisted History of St. Patrick's Day.

Appropriately enough, there’s a good deal of blarney out there about Ole St. Pat.

What is known is that he was born in 389 A.D. in Banwen, Wales.

His name wasn’t Patrick, it was Maewyn Succat. The moniker “Patrick” was given to him later in life by Pope Celestine.

At the age of 16, this not particularly religious boy, was kidnapped by Irish Raiders, brought to Ireland and enslaved. During his time on the Emerald Isle he became a devout Christian. FULL STOP! He became a devout Christian?  I thought it was Paddy who introduced Christianity to Ireland? Nope.

Legend holds – and sometimes legend is a real whopper --that Christianity was brought to England and Ireland by Joseph of Arimathea or his son Josephus.  Joe of A. Sr., you might remember, was the guy who offered up his own tomb for Christ’s burial. Legend holds that somehow or another he got a hold of the cup Christ used in the Last Supper and used it to catch his blood as he died on the cross.  Then, either he or his son took the cup to England and buried it.  This cup was known in French as the “Sang Real” –the True Blood. Say “Sang Real” three times fast and you’re saying Grail –the Holy Grail – Monty Python and all that Jazz.  Point is:  Ireland had Christians before Patrick.

Eventually, Maewyyn escaped back to England joined the clergy and was ordained a priest. After Bishop Palladius, the first Irish missionary croaked in 431, Pope Celestine gave Maewyyn the new name of "Patercius" (from Latin "pater civium" meaning "the father of his people" think "paternity.")

Patercius went back to the Old Sod to minister to the Christians already living there and to convert the rest of the unwashed heathen.

Did St. Patrick really drive the snakes out of Ireland? 
People who know such things say there never were snakes in Ireland.  The story is symbolic. Ireland was pagan. The snake has always been symbolic of the devil (See Adam & Eve.) So in other words, St. Patrick rid Ireland of its pagan customs and gave Da Divil a boot in tha arse ta boot.

The Shamrock
The vast majority of the Irish were pagans. Members of Ireland’s ruling class were called Druids. It was from this class that the pagan priests emerged.  They worshipped nature and considered the shamrock a sacred plant. Three was also a mystical number to the Celts. (Here’s a weird “one world” connection there is a trefoil plant in Arabia called a shamrakh. This same plant is considered sacred in Iran). As the story goes, Patrick, knowing the shamrock’s mystical importance used it to explain the Christian concept of the Trinity: Father, Son & the Holy Ghost/Spirit.

Problem is --the first written citation of this story did not appear until the time of the Protestant Reformation, nearly a thousand years after his death. Odds are it never happened.

Irish legend also credits St. Pat with the idea of using the pagan veneration of the sun for Christian advantage. He added a sun-like disc to the Christian crucifix, creating the Celtic cross. Maybe.

St. Patrick’s Day

This holy day commemorates the anniversary of his death on March 17^th 461 AD.

St. Patrick’s Day is the religious feast day of the patron saint of Ireland. No surprise then that in this very Catholic country it was merely a religious holy day. In fact, up until the 1970s, Irish laws dictated that all pubs were to remain locked tight on March 17th. It was a day to go to mass, not out galavanting. Notice the word “was”. They can thank the Yanks for that. Because it was in America that St. Patrick’s Day became what it is today.

Let me explain.

The myth of America says it was founded upon the principle of religious freedom. Truth is: no one really wanted the Jews, the Catholics, or the Quakers for that matter. (Let’s not even talk about those pesky Hindus. Kidding, I'm kidding.)

Irish Catholics began arriving in numbers just after the War of 1812.

By the height of the potato famine in 1847, it seemed as if the island of Manhattan was going to sink from the weight of Irish immigrants flooding ashore.

You can visit the Irish Famine Memorial just north of the World Financial Center. It consists of an Irish cottage that was abandoned during the famine shipped to the shores of New York and set up on a platform overlooking the Hudson River facing the Statue of Liberty.

The Paddys were quite unloved and were depicted as belligerent drunks, thieves, and un-American Papists waiting for word from the Pope to take over the country. 

They were arrested so often the police vans were called paddy wagons.  They were referred to as “Blacks turned inside out”. Newspaper illustrations usually pictured the Irish as little monkeys or big apes.

Here's a link to the Irish Times article about the practice

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/art-and-design/apes-psychos-alcos-how-british-cartoonists-depict-the-irish-1.3149409

An interesting book that explains all of this is called How the Irish became white by Noel Ignatiev.

Ironically, this derogatory ethnic stereotyping is kept alive today in the mascot for America’s most prestigious Irish Catholic University-- Notre Dame’s Fighting Irish symbol.

In New York, the micks settled in a sprawling neighborhood called Little Ireland. You know that neighborhood today as Chinatown, Little Italy and Nolita.  There is very little left of Little Ireland other than a Chinese Restaurant on Pell Street still called Pele's Dinty and a street called Kenmare named after a town in County Kerry (which, Don’t ya know once won the coveted title of Tidiest Town in Ireland.)

Another McRelic is the original St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Nolita now called Old St. Patrick’s Church ( 264 Mulberry Street.) It was the church the community defended in the movie  “Gangs of New York.” The scene depicted in the film was an actual historic event.

We can thank Oliver Cromwell for another historic event that was later played out on the streets of New York. In 1649 Cromwell invaded Ireland, performed a few sizeable massacres confiscated 40% of the land and gave it as back pay to his Protestant soldiers. And thus began “The Troubles.” Northern Ireland became home to the Protestant Orange Order, which marched (and still marches) through Belfast's Catholic neighborhoods every July 12th.  It was a reminder that in 1690 William of Orange defeated the Catholic King James.  It’d be kinda like if Boston Red Sox Fans marched through the Bronx each October chanting: Choke! Choke! Choke!

In the 1820s Ulster immigrants brought the Orange Order to America and in an act sure to provoke violence, they marched through New York’s Catholic neighborhood chanting “Croppies Lie Down”.  This was the historical antecedent to the present-day Neo-Nazis marching through Jewish neighborhoods under police protection.

The worst of these riots occurred in 1871 at 24^th Street and Eighth Ave. At that street corner soldiers guarding a small group of parading Orangemen fired volleys point-blank into crowds of jeering Irish Catholics. Over 60 Irish Catholics were killed.

(See illustration)

In addition, Anti-Catholic mobs like the Bowery Boys, (separate from the Orange Order) would march through Irish neighborhoods on St. Patrick’s Day carrying “Paddies” effigies of the Irish Patron Saint dressed in rags holding a whiskey bottle, wearing a string of potatoes or a necklace of codfish, mocking the Catholic custom of fasting.  

Thus, the Irish became the Fighting Irish. They began to organize in self-defense. In 1836, they formed the Ancient Order of Hibernians. (Hibernia is the Latin name for Ireland.) The AOH would eventually field three thousand armed men in uniform.

ST. PATRICK'S CELEBRATION 

The first St. Patrick’s Day celebration in America was held in Boston in 1737. It seems to have been a small fund-raising dinner dance. But the Micks up in Boston love to mention it to the Paddys in New York.

THE PARADE

The world’s first St. Patrick’s Day parade was held in New York City in 1761, when a contingent of Irish soldiers in the British Army paraded up Broadway. The parade continued to be held under the auspices of military organizations until 1812.

By 1853 the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH) began to play a dominant role in the parade.  Now that they had a paramilitary organization, they needed a parade to strut their stuff. So the parade became kind of like the old May Day Parades in Moscow, a way to flaunt the size of the Irish martial might, an annual “Look how many men we have --don’t mess with us” reminder to the Protestant majority. It was no coincidence that the parade was held on Fifth Avenue not only the site of the new cathedral but also the home of the ruling class. The parade soon became an opportunity for politicians to court the “Green Machine” the oh-so-important immigrant vote.

To this day the AOH still runs NY’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade.
The AOH remembers well the blood spilled on the sidewalks of New York, which is why there’s a distinct martial air to its parade. As opposed to -- say in Chicago -- where the parade is led by leprechauns on rollerblades followed by costumed characters dressed as the Honey Baked Bears, Monster Trucks from Rock Stations, double-decker buses with ads for Irish bars and lovely lassies handing out samples of Irish Spring soap. In New York, a military regiment, NY's own Fighting 69th, always leads the parade.

Today, the 264th New York City Saint Patrick's Day Parade will "step off" at 11AM and take a stroll up Fifth Avenue.

Aside from the parade, New York City also may have added one other important ingredient to the holiday.  If you asked for corned beef and cabbage in Ireland most folks will scratch their noggins.  The Irish ate and still eat something called Bacon and Cabbage, corned pork that looks and tastes very much like the corned beef you have at Katz’s deli.  I’ve read that Irish New Yorkers were introduced to corned beef by their Jewish neighbors on the Lower East Side. I’m not absolutely sure of this but it seems plausible. Or it could just be blarney with a slathering of schmaltz.

The songwriters of NY’s Tin Pan Alley ( 28^th Street between Broadway and 6^th Ave)also added some o’tunes to the party, writing such ditties as: When Irish Eyes Are Smiling, Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral, Mother Machree and Little Bit of Heaven, Sure they call it Ireland. These sentimental songs were played in the Music Halls of the Bowery to entertain homesick Irish immigrants.

Another American addition to the Irish story is the happy go lucky leprechaun.

The Irish "lobaircin” were tiny little pissed-off men whose job it was to mend the smelly shoes of all the other fairies. Walt Disney’s 1959 film DarbyO'Gill & the Little People, pictured them as happy little loveable green smurfs. And this view of them has become dominant ever since.

America officially won the culture war in 1995 when the Irish Government began a national campaign to use St. Patrick's Day as an opportunity to generate tourism; they happily opened the alcohol floodgates and promoted a St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Dublin. 

So in the end the 34.3 million Americans who claim Irish descent wound up influencing the O.G.’s (Original Greensters) --the 3.9 million Paddys they’d descended from.

To sum up:  we’ve taken some pagan traditions --shamrocks, sun worship and fairies and added them to Ireland’s most important Saint’s feast day -- then turned that into a celebration of Green Beer, Mc Donald’s Shamrock Shakes, a good deal of Sure and Begorra, some Lucky Leprechauns and quite a few inebriated teenagers wearing Kiss me I’m Irish buttons.

An estimated 93.3 million Americans say they plan to wear green today. Me--- I think I’ll just stay home in bed. 

And if you don’t like it you can, as they so sweetly say in Gaelic: 

Pòg mo thòin (pronounced Pug Ma hone) Translation: Kiss me keester.

Donal O’Siodhachain
(Daniel Sheehan)

The Curiously Twisted History of Saint Valentine's Day

 

Okay, so what's with the little fat guy with the bow and arrow shooting people in the ass? 

Well, by now you know the drill. 

Many present-day Western holidays can be traced back to the Greeks.

Somewhere along the line the Romans borrowed those ideas and not long after, the Christian Church changed their meaning to put a "holy" spin on them.

They became known as holy days--- holidays. 

St. Valentine's Day is no exception.

Snap zoom back to Greece. 

EROS - son of Chaos

Chaos

Aphrodite

Eros is the god of love. 

He was not only exotic he was erotic. He was the son of Chaos “the original primeval emptiness of the universe.”  (Imagine what that title would look like on a business card.) 

Later tradition held that Eros was the son of Aphrodite; goddess of sexuality (root word for aphrodisiac)

In this version the paternity is a little fuzzy.
His pops was either Zeus, Ares - the god of war or Hermes, the Divine messenger of the Gods (and one hell of a scarf maker.)  

Ares --the God of War (not to be confused with the astrological sign of the ram Aries) always traveled with an entourage that included his sister Eris, and her sons Phobos, Metus, Demios and Pallor.

In English, his homies were Discord, Panic, Fear, Dread, and Terror.  (Phobos gives us the word for “fear of”: phobia. Pallor’s terror makes us “pale”.)

Eros had two sidekicks: Pothos and Himeros (Longing and Desire). Isn’t it always longing and desire that gets humans into trouble with things erotic?

Eros was an adult but through the years he was depicted younger and younger until he appeared as a cherub-like infant. Kind of a fat, horny little butterball.

Eros getting younger...

And younger.

In many illustrations, Eros is shown blindfolded because, of course, love is blind. Eros was armed with both darts and arrows. Once wounded by their magic tips the victim will either fall uncontrollably in love or have a total disinterest in the first person they see.

Before we go on a Roman holiday let’s swing by India for a second.

In another one of those one-world connections, there is a Hindu love god called Kama (as in Sutra.) 

He also carries a bow and arrow. He isn’t winged but flies on the back of a parrot or a sparrow and is accompanied by a honeybee, which symbolizes love’s sweetness and its sting. For some bizarre reason in modern-day India young Indians have taken a liking to Cupid over Kama and send each other Valentines, instead of Kamas. In fact, I read that 65% of people around the world intend to celebrate Valentine's Day this year.  

And who in the world gets the most amount of Valentines each year?  Teachers.  Proving the world is either populated with suck-ups or kids                                         hot for teacher.

Okay back to Europe.

Along come the Romans.  

They swipe most of the Greek gods and give them new names. Aphrodite becomes Venus (Venus is the root word for venereal). Ares the God of war becomes Mars (Mars is the root word for "martial" i.e. warlike.)

Eros becomes Cupid, son of Venus and Mercury the Roman messenger of the gods. 

Since Mercury was kind of a Divine Federal Express service he has become the patron god of the Business world. You’ll see him all over the place here in the Capital of Capitalism.

You’ll see him and his little winged-hat on the front of Grand Central Terminal.

You’ll also see a stylized version of his helmet as ornaments jutting out from the Chrysler Building.

Did your Dad or Grandpa drive a Mercury?

This god not only got his own day of the week--Wednesday (or in Spanish Miercoles, in French Mercredi) you'll even find this pagan god next to "In God we trust" on our money.

Okay, enough mercury madness--I'm becoming mad as a hatter. (there's a connection there if you want to look it up)

So Cupid gets married to Psyche

Psyche translates to "Soul" and is the root word that Sigmund Freud gave to his new science, which he called "Psyche-ology", it would later lose the "e." He kept the mythology though, as in an “Oedipal complex” based on the Greek character: Oedipus. 

Cupid is known for leading Psyche. Which is a beautiful allegory for the soul being lead by love.

Okay, so now we got this little fat guy shooting people in the ass with arrows. My guess is when he shot '

em in the butt they yelled "Damn Cupid" and later he became known as Dan Cupid. Just a guess there.

HOW FEBRUARY BECAME THE HORNY MONTH

In Rome, February was traditionally the time of the Lupercian festival, originally called the festival of februalia from the Latin word for purification. It was both a purification fest and an ode to the god of fertility and a celebration of sensual pleasure, thus a time to meet and greet a prospective mate. During this festival, half-naked male runners smacked women in the butt with leather thongs made from goats (thus horny ---get it) called "februa" in the belief that the act would make a barren woman fertile In Roman mythology Lupercus is a god identified with the Roman equivalent of Pan a fertility god who had the horns and hindquarters of a goat.Februa and the festival day of Februarius on Feb.15th is obviously where the month of February gets its name. 

In the 5th Century, when the Roman Catholics were running Rome, the church decided folks were getting just a little too randy. There was a little too much thong-slapping going on. 

So in the year 496 Pope Gelasius outlawed the pagan festival and began promoting a Saint who had been beheaded by Emperor Claudius in 278 A.D. for marrying young lovers, his name --- St. Valentine. 

St. Valentine getting past the velvet ropes and into heaven

His feast day was set, conveniently enough, one day before the Lupercian festival. Eventually, the Lupercian orgy died down but traditions don't die as easily.  

Nowadays, no one knows who the hell St. Valentine was or whether to spell it Valentine's Day or Valentines Day. They even forget to use his hard-earned title of Saint. But everyone knows the little fat bastard armed with bow and arrow.
 

In other words, Cupid is still around 1,529 years after he was outlawed.
 

An outlaw of love.
 

Happy Februarius Everyone.
 

And a happy thong-slapping to all of you.

   Dano Cupid