April Fools’ Day is a fairly odd holiday, if it can be called that. No culture in the world truly celebrates April Fools’ Day and there are no public holidays for it, yet it’s still in all the calendars every year. Everyone knows it’s on April 1st, which is surprisingly handy when that’s also your date of birth.
I don’t think it’s that odd to have a birthday on April Fools’ Day, it doesn’t really mean anything to me, but there is a uniqueness to it. When I wake up on my birthday, I’m ready to see which brand has decided to step up its PR by playing along with the pranks and tomfoolery. For example, the trending topic of Cornhub was a particular eyesore of recent years. I get the usual ‘Happy April Fools’ Day’ messages but it’s nothing that extraordinary compared to people I know who are born on Christmas Day. People center their year around New Year’s and Christmas, but my birthday on April Fools’ Day has been consistently synonymous with the Easter holiday. A holiday I much prefer and seems more recognisable within the March/April window, but also because of fond memories during my Easter holiday when I was younger.
My school days were blessed with my birthday usually falling during the Easter term holidays. These holidays I remember spending with my nanny attending our local cinema, a tradition that happened every school holiday and that I carried on until I left education. Thanks to Easter, my birthday did not just involve Easter eggs, but also big-budget blockbusters or family films too. Therefore, it was never spent in boredom. I was able to dabble my nan’s film palette with such cinema like Monsters vs. Aliens, Chicken Little and my personal favourite, Mr. Beans Holiday. These are a few of the films that I’ll always associate with my birthday and to those simpler times of choosing pick n mix and enjoying whatever Dreamworks trash was playing. But as I grew up, those films then shifted towards superheroes and action, once again fortunately having Captain America: The Winter Soldier fall in that fabled late-March slot.
Whilst I can still enjoy family gatherings where we book a whole row at the cinema to watch adventure films like Ready Player One, the most common point to me will always be Easter. Most recently, Peter Rabbit was the chosen family film and the reruns of Hop on DVD at home has left irredeemable damage on me. I’m not sure if this is just me, just people born around this date or everyone in general, but April Fools’ just isn’t that special. Indeed, some jokes are classics, BBC’s Smell-O-Vision being the highlight, but the yearly videos of teenagers trying to ‘prank’ their parents by faking a pregnancy shows how pranks really shouldn’t be celebrated or given a whole day for.
Furthermore, April Fools’ in film doesn’t really exist, there is no sub-genre of it, just a supposedly average 80s horror film. April Fools’ is really just a countdown to Easter, which is still an odd occasion cluttered with more bank holidays than I can think off. Still, today I celebrate my 21st and I look forward to whatever joke is the centrefold of this year, let’s face it – we all need it.
Featured Image Courtesy of StudioCanal.
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