A PAUCITY OF PUCKS N' PRANKS

Or, where have all the April Fools’ Day greeting cards gone?

By Samantha Tooting-Beck, an avid April Fools’ Day prankster and puckish pixie with a very fertile imagination and way too much time on her hands to waste it on serious stuff

It’s always been a mystery to me why I can never find April Fools’ Day cards in stores . Now there's a paucity of Pucks and pranks if ever there was one!

Who says loons and buffoons don’t deserve their own card? Why has Hallmark, (who keep us chortling on birthdays and holidays), forgotten to commemorate this rather fine occasion with a card?

Perhaps by encouraging the “Inner Fool” in all of us to come out and play …card companies think all hell will break loose, the sky will fall on them, or even scarier …they’ll be sued up the ying-yang by an emperor without any clothes on.

The origin of April Fools’ Day dates back more than five hundred years, to some powerful potentates in Europe who wanted a new calendar. Or, maybe it had something to do with the Fickle Finger of Fate’s bad hair day!

Truth is, people got bored in the good old days. Let’s face it bread and circus performances were wearing a tad thin. And cooling one’s heels on a street corner in the hope of meeting a guy named “Godot” wasn’t all that much fun either.

Change is always hard …especially if some poor fish wants to keep the old calendar festive occasions, while new kids on the block want to muck up everything. Not surprisingly, chaos ensued. (You know …the typical right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing, the usual foot in the mouth games, not to mention the odd tongue-in-cheek was bound to drive most clodplates, cretins and cullies crazy.)

Naturally, the fools -- those who didn’t celebrate the New Year in January but liked a lot of hoopla to mark the birth of spring -- got the short end of the stick. But pucks (and for that matter pixies) should never be under-estimated.

January, June or whatever ...what's a mundane month or two either way among friends? People, people, people ...it's time to let go of all that linear thinking and cogitate outside the box or color beyond the lines for pity's sake!!

When it comes down to it, who else but a fool can be relied upon to rush in where wise men never go? By the way, Mars has gone retrograde so don’t act on that tip about a gold scheme in the jungles of Indonesia …unless of course you dream of playing with funny money in a place called “Fool’s Paradise”!

Poppycock problems always demand super-sized solutions, so fools got down to business. Turning tables on twits and twerps, not to mention Tweedledees & Tweedledums, seemed like good idea at the time.
And, thanks to those playful pranks on “All Fools Day”, tickling funnybones is infinitely more entertaining than snapping chicken (wish)bones.

So toss your troubles in the trashcan, face down your fear making a fool of yourself in public, and start handing out your own "frequent featherbrain" or "frequent flubber” cards! After all, what better way to honor our "Inner Fool" than the gift of glee.

So get out there and enjoy a lick of laughter, a jolt of joy, or maybe a taste of titillation at least one day a year!

__________

(1) Beware: An Inner Fool is On the Loose! (for a close-up view, take a peek at this one in the Quipping Queen's online gallery): http://www.flickr.com/photos/quippingqueen/6845906/

Note: Perhaps the reason why there's a shortage of silly stuff on the April Fools' Day shelves can be attributed to an elusive legal beagle named "Murphy" or else a strange phenomena discovered by Douglas Adams (1952-2001) in his wonky work of wit, "Mostly Harmless", that "The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair."

If perchance you're looking for the perfect present for a scatterbrained soul born on All Fools' Day, let your fingers do the walking over to: http://presentpicker.com/ppp/april/april_fools_day/html