Here are good cultural questions, Is April Fool celebrated worldwide? And where those it come from? I believe Mary langenback has a good answer for you, enjoy:
April fools day is an interesting holiday many nationalities celebrate. In England a fool is called a "gob" or "gobby". The victim of the prank is called a "noodle". In India there is a Huli festival (March 31st) to celebrate the coming of spring. In this festival people smear colors on each other. In Mexico, it is celebrated December 28, one of the main pranks is for a borrower not to return any money borrowed on that day, instead they send the lender a box of candies telling them that they have been fooled. These are just several of many different ways that different nationalities celebrate or use different terminology for what we call April Fools day. The custom of shouting "April Fool" was brought to America in the early 1600's. Today it is celebrated in many countries in addition to the United States, such as Germany, France, Scotland, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, and Norway. Its origin is quite vague as there are several different claims to the origins. One of the traditions most often given states that it began in 1582 with the change of the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar. According to this tradition in the Julian calendar the New Year was celebrated for 8 days from March 25th to April 1st. However, when the calendar was changed and the New Year began to be celebrated January 1st, there were people who didn't know about it for years because of the slow communication of the times, and others who stubbornly refused to believe it. These people continued to celebrate the old holiday on April 1st and began to be considered fools. They became the butt of jokes and thus the pranks began, which ranged from the simple ("your shoelaces are untied") to the more complex pranks of sending victims on ridiculous errands, or to search for something non-existent. However, the problem with this is that the calendar was changed in 1582, but the British didn't accept the Gregorian calendar until the mid-1700's; however, they were celebrating April Fools day long before that.
