Fools in France

Luckily (for little boys with a wicked streak) the French observe April Fool's Day. We set the alarm clock for an early start and played our first trick on our neighbours - Mal and Paul.  We attached lots of tin cans on string to the back bumper of their car. The death rate for cars on the track to the Old Lock is fairly high and the hideous rattle they heard as they pulled out of their parking space dutifully worried them!

Meanwhile, all the local French schoolchildren were creating hundreds of paper fish.
And why?
Apparently in 1564 King Charles of France decreed that the new Gregorian calendar would replace the old Julian calendar. This meant a change to the order of the months and moved New Year's Day to the now familiar date of January 1st. In the Julian calendar the New Year had been celebrated at the end of March/beginning of April.
France is an enormous country and in 1564 it lacked cohesion and certainly did not have a reliable method of communicating to the masses. So the message about the new calendar did not get through to everybody and for quite some time there were people who still celebrated the New Year on the 1st of April. Those people who had made the change to the new official calendar made fun of those who had not changed and called them "fools". This eventually evolved into "Poisson d'avril" (meaning April fish) because this false New Year celebration coincided with the sun leaving the zodiacal sign of Pisces (which has a fish as its symbol).
Back to downtown St Jean de Losne and two Bailey boys running riot in the school playground along with all their classmates, sticking cartoon fish to teachers' and schoolfriends' backs and yelling "Poisson d'avril" at them.