The great thing on the First of April is to have a good memory. Most people know about April fooling, but many people forget about it when the special day arrives. Some of you children, no doubt, have forgotten; with the result that the joker with a good memory has made of you an April Fool. In coming down to breakfast you have been asked quite solemnly, let us say, why your hair is brushed to the wrong side. If you have gone and peeped into a looking-glass there was an instant burst of laughter, and then you have become aware that All Fools' Day has come round again. Some boys and girls get angry when they have been thus fooled; but that only adds to their foolishness. A good plan is to laugh with those who are laughing; and you can better this plan by catching the joker off his guard. By so doing you may, if you are clever at keeping a solemn face, make a fool of the joker in his turn. Then the laugh is with you, and you can feel quite pleased with yourself until the next All Fools' Day.
This is the great festival of the Practical Joker, and all is well when his jokes are simple and amusing. To pin a piece of paper on someone's back, or to send the school Dunce into a bookseller's shop for a "History of Adam's Grandfather," is quite good fun. But there are some jokes which are carefully prepared in order to give pain to the persons upon whom they are played; they are not amusing, but merely cruel. It is not a good joke, for instance, to balance a bowl of water upon the top of a door, so that the first person to enter the room gets drenched. Neither is it nice fun to send an innocent boy upon an errand with a letter containing the instruction: "Send the fool another mile." This used to be a common form of April joke in Scotland, and it was not unusual to keep the poor boy trudging long distances for the greater part of the day. This is not fun, but a stupid form of cruelty; and of much the same character as the hoax that is played upon tradesmen who are asked to send goods to a particular house upon a particular morning. It is only when the vans choke up the street from end to end that someone remembers it is the First of April, and that the Practical Joker—a stupid and heartless person in this case—has again been exhibiting his foolishness.
PALM SUNDAY.
In the New Testament you have it written that Jesus entered Jerusalem for the last time riding on a colt, the foal of an ass. Two of his disciples, acting upon the instructions of their Master, had entered a village near the Mount of Olives, and there they found the colt by the door without, in a place where two ways met. They unloosed the animal, telling those that stood by and questioned them, that the Master had need of him. Then they brought the colt to Jesus, who mounted upon its back, after some of the disciples had spread their garments thereon. It was thus that Jesus rode into Jerusalem to his death. And when the great multitude of people who were gathered to the Passover saw him coming they cut branches from the palm trees by the side of the way, and spread them on the ground before Jesus, while they cried with joyful voices: "Hosanna; blessed be the King that cometh in the name of the Lord."
In this incident you have the origin of Palm Sunday. It is the first day of Holy Week, the week which is dedicated by the Catholic Church to the commemoration of the sufferings and death of Jesus. With the early church throughout Europe it was the custom to lay the branches of a tree upon the altar on this day, and as the palm tree does not grow in Europe, the box, the yew, and especially the willow tree, were used instead. The branches were blessed by the priest, sprinkled with holy water, and then carried in procession through the town. As part of this procession it was sometimes arranged to have a figure representing Jesus sitting upon an ass—either a living figure or one made of wood, sitting upon a wooden animal. This wooden effigy was drawn along upon wheels, and the people in the street scattered the consecrated branches before it. Flowers were sometimes used as well as the branches of trees.
It is a beautiful ceremony, this blessing of flowers and tree-branches upon Palm Sunday in memory of Christ's entry into Jerusalem, and it is one to interest all you children. But in the Middle Ages a great many unworthy things, such as the selling of palm-branches in order to avert diseases, became associated with Palm Sunday. Indeed, that whole week, the week that should have been so solemn and sacred, was turned into an occasion of feasting and frivolity. At the Reformation many of these unworthy things were abolished, and the ceremonies in connection with Palm Sunday were considerably modified here in England. Yet in some parts of the country it is still a custom to go a-palming—that is to say, to gather willow-branches—on the day before Palm Sunday.
With the Roman Catholic Church, however, and especially in the ceremonies at Rome during Holy Week, an important place is given to Palm Sunday. The officiating priest blesses the branches, which are then distributed. In the solemn mass that follows, the people in the congregation hold the branches in their hands to the end of the service. In most cases these consecrated branches are taken home and preserved during the year; then they are burned and the ashes used upon Ash Wednesday.