19-year-old Helena Muffly wrote exactly 100 years ago today:
Wednesday, December 16, 1914: <<no entry>>
Her middle-aged granddaughter’s comments 100 years later:
Another day with no diary entry . . . sigh. . . so I’ll continue the story about Grandma’s sense of humor when she was an older woman.
My aunt mentioned in yesterday’s post that her mother (Grandma) always enjoyed a good joke or story. She also told me how much Grandma enjoyed playing pranks on April Fools’ Day.
There are several versions of the April Fools story (or maybe Grandma did similar pranks a couple different years). Here’s how my cousin Anne Marie told the April Fools’ day story in a guest post several years ago:
One April Fools’ Day Grandma took an old newspaper from her basement and carefully glued all of the pages together and quietly placed it in our newspaper box. I can still hear Mom laughing when she tried to read the paper that day and it didn’t take her long to figure out who the prankster was.
A Hundred Years Ago 
Haha Helena was so funny!
Diana xo
She did have a sense of humor.
Good one! Helena was “a caution.”
🙂
What a cute prank (harmless, but I’m sure her parents were a little upset that they couldn’t read the paper that day!)!
I have no idea how she did it, but maybe she used an old paper for the interior pages for the prank. . . then the new paper would be lurking somewhere to be retrieved after the joke was completed.
That is a good prank!
I thought so, too. 🙂
How fun to learn this about your grandmother. My oldest granddaughter would do something like this!
It sounds like your granddaughter has a wonderful sense of humor.
Does she ever! She was really good friends with their previous neighbor, and they were always looking for practical jokes to play on each other. It was even better when she got video and I could watch, too. She invited some neighborhood friends over when the rest of the family was out of town, and they set up pranks for when the others returned–turning bathroom doorknobs backward so others would get locked in the bathroom, ping pong balls in the microwave, to name a couple.
What fun! You have a wonderful granddaughter.
She was funny!
I agree!
I remember how important April Fool’s Day was to us as kids, but for the life of me I can’t remember any of the pranks we pulled. I do remember that, once I was older, I was capable of telling my mother the most outlandish things, which she often believed.
I did just remember one, from grade school. It was common to tell a girl that her slip was showing. Oh, horror!
I can remember the slip was showing thing, too. I guess that dates us–it’s been a long time since kids wore slips.
My mother got me every April Fools Day even though I expected it. But darn it! I can’t remember any of them now. It takes creativity.
Sometimes I think that playing April Fools’ pranks was more popular 40 or 50 years ago than what it is now.