Easter Dissonance, April Fools and Śmigus Dyngus
The season has definitively turned this week as frosts begin to scour the Summer vegetables and the landscape in my region is now aflame with Autumnal leaves. I was supposed to start posting my articles about Samhain in the lead-up to the ‘spooky season’ but I completely forgot we celebrated Easter and April Fools together this week, and I wanted to write about April Fools’ Day and the fun Eastern European celebration of Smigus Dyngus.
Long-time readers will know that for me, celebrating (secular) Easter at this time of year comes, as always, with a large scraping of seasonal dissonance from stores, households and tables decorated with the symbols, icons and colours of Spring. Although I enjoy the chocolate hunt as much as my children, as well as the excitement of a visit from the Easter Bunny, I have been rebelling against the seasonal dislocation for a while.
This year my rebellion was a bit more public with the creation of an Autumned-themed rather than Spring-themed hat for my youngest son’s first Easter Hat Parade at school. It felt good to share the magic of Autumn with my youngest and foster his appreciation for the season. Next year we’re planning on a Baba Yaga-themed hat, if my son maintains his joy in celebrating the seasons, which will be hard to avoid, considering my own enthusiasm!
I appreciate the symbology of Easter as a seasonal marker but celebrate these Spring-themed traditions in September, at the Spring Equinox. Does anyone else do the same? For those interested in the symbology of Easter and the Spring Equinox, I wrote two articles about it six months ago:
Spring Equinox: Celebrating Easter in the Antipodes - Part 1 about the Christian Easter, Oestre, the March Hare, Easter Witches and the Easter Bunny
Spring Equinox: Celebrating Easter in the Antipodes - Part 2 about Easter eggs, Easter hunts, Easter games and Easter foods
Unusually, this year we hunted Easter Eggs on the last Sunday in March and the First of April, April Fool’s Day fell on Easter Monday. I don’t celebrate April Fool’s Day in my household but I do enjoy reading or hearing about April Fools Day shenanigans, especially from the Government, whose various branches/organisations often post fun and light-hearted April Fools Day news articles and social media posts (looking at you in particular Australian Federal Police).
Some people with Eastern European backgrounds may even have celebrated Śmigus Dingus, a tradition connected to Easter Monday but very much in the fun spirit of April Fools. Let’s explore the origins and traditions behind April Fools Day and Śmigus Dingus.
April Fools
April Fools' Day, celebrated on April 1st, is a day dedicated to lighthearted pranks across the globe. Its origins, however, remain a mystery.
The most widely accepted theory traces April Fools' Day back to 1582 when France transitioned from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar. Those who failed to realise that the start of the new year had shifted to January 1st and continued to celebrate it during the end of March became the targets of jokes and pranks. Another theory points to the ancient Roman festival of Hilaria, celebrated at the end of March, where people would dress up in disguises and mock one another.
In Scotland, the tradition evolved into a two-day event involving sending people on phony errands, called Hunting the Gowk, and attaching fake tails or "kick me" signs to unsuspecting individuals. In France and Italy, an April Fools’ Day tradition involves sticking a paper fish on someone’s back without them noticing. It is called April Fish, or Poisson d’Avril in French and Pesce d’Aprile in Italian. In Portugal, it’s common to celebrate Dia das Mentiras or Day of Lies with pranks and hoaxes.
Modern times have seen media outlets and brands participate in April Fools' Day by broadcasting outlandish stories to trick their audiences. One of the earliest April Fools pranks in the media occurred in 1749. A London newspaper advertised an extraordinary event where a man planned to contort himself into a wine bottle and serenade the audience from within, among other astonishing feats. Legend has it that two individuals made a wager on whether people would attend to witness the seemingly impossible spectacle. The result exceeded expectations, with the venue packed to capacity. However, to the dismay of the attendees, no performer materialized on stage. Feeling deceived, the audience erupted into a riot.
However, the Great Spaghetti Harvest Hoax remains one of the most famous April Fools' Day pranks of all time. Orchestrated by the globally respected and (usually) serious BBC in 1957, it featured a family in Switzerland harvesting spaghetti from trees, exploiting the public's unfamiliarity with the food, which was not widely eaten in the UK at the time. The hoax was so successful that many viewers contacted the BBC for advice on growing their own spaghetti trees. Please do yourself a favour and watch the short (2:26mins) BBC documentary below, it’s so well done!
The BBC unknowingly participated in an April Fools’ prank in 1976, when their radio network reported on British astronomer Patrick Moore’s Jovian-Plutonian Gravitational Effect. Moore claimed that at 9:47 am on April 1 an alignment of Jupiter and Pluto would temporarily reduce Earth's gravity, allowing people to feel a floating sensation if they jumped at the exact right moment. The hoax was successful, with many people calling into the BBC to report they felt the effects.
The short (2:35mins) video below provides a quick and colourful potted history of April Fool’s Day.
This year, April Fools Day happened to fall on Easter Monday, also known as Śmigus-Dyngus, Wet Monday or Dyngus Day among the Polish diaspora.
Śmigus Dyngus
Śmigus-Dyngus is a Polish tradition celebrated on the Monday and Tuesday following Easter Sunday. Also known as Dyngus Day, it involves the playful custom of dousing others with water, often using buckets, or plastic bottles and water guns in modern times, or even dunking people in rivers, ponds and cold baths. People of all ages participate in light-hearted water fights, symbolically washing away the sorrows and hardships of the past year and welcoming the arrival of spring with renewed energy and vitality. Men traditionally drenched women on the Monday, and women did the same to men on the Tuesday.
Many scholars believe the custom of Śmigus-Dyngus has pre-Christian roots related to the Spring Equinox and water’s symbolism of rebirth, renewal and fertility. Drenching people with water (traditionally newly thawed water) also symbolised cleansing away dirt and diseases. For Christians, water drenching symbolises the cleansing of the year’s sins and the ritual of baptism. This custom is also an ancient form of courtship, with young men often targeting young women they are interested in with water as a playful way to express affection.
An accompanying custom that has (thankfully) fallen out of fashion involves whipping each other’s legs with pussy-willow, birch or even juniper branches. Both the water drenching and pussy-willow whipping could be stopped with the exchange of a decorated Easter egg called pysanky.
The name Śmigus-Dyngus is derived from two Polish words: śmigus, meaning to splash or pour water, and dyngus, which refers to the act of shaking or striking. Historically, the tradition was practised mainly in Poland, but it has spread to other Slavic countries and regions with significant Polish communities, such as Ukraine, Slovakia, and parts of the Czech Republic.
In modern times, Śmigus-Dyngus has become a popular and widely anticipated tradition in the Polish diaspora, with organised events and festivals featuring traditional music, dancing and food, as well as communal water fights. The video (2:05 mins) below shows footage of Śmigus-Dyngus celebrations in the small Southern Polish town of Wilamowice.
I hope you enjoyed this week’s article. I’m looking forward to sharing the first of four articles next week about the end of the warm half of the year, the start of winter and the celebration of Samhain/Halloween.