Happy Monday, everyone. If you haven’t yet read it, check out Robbi’s post on our theme of the week. I won’t tell you what the theme is, because not knowing the theme is part of the fun.

A boy named Douglas could not tell a lie. He tried, but it simply did not work. When he said something that was not true, his skin turned red and his hair stood up and his nostrils pinched in a way that let everyone know that the words he was saying had nothing to do with the actual truth.

For this reason, Douglas never told a lie, even when he wanted to.

For this reason, everyone trusted everything Douglas said.

It was nice, being trusted. And, generally speaking, Douglas didn’t mind being honest, as it tended to keep him out of certain kinds of trouble. But one day each year, his inability to tell even the tiniest fib was most bothersome, and that day was April 1^st, when the only thing he wanted to do was play great big fat tricks on everyone he knew.

Douglas tried to fool people on April Fool’s Day. He would wear a false mustache to the breakfast table and try to convince his mother that he was Abraham Lincoln. He would cover a rock with gold-colored paint and try to convince his friend Ben that it was a lump of gold worth seven million dollars. He would try to convince his English teacher that the principal had outlawed all spelling tests, forever.

But no one fell for Douglas’s April Fool’s jokes, year after year after year.

One year, when Douglas was 11, he decided to try a different approach.

He saved his allowance for a long time and used the money to hire an Abraham Lincoln impersonator to eat breakfast with his mom. She was amazed!

He used the rest of his money to buy a really tiny piece of gold to show his friend Ben. Even though the piece of gold was very, very small, Ben was extremely impressed!

And because Douglas had not missed a single day of school for five straight years, he convinced the principal to grant him one wish, which was to ban spelling tests for just one day. When Douglas informed his classmates, they stood up and cheered!

He hadn’t fooled a single person and he hadn’t told a single lie, but everyone was happy, and he didn’t have to take his spelling test.

And there you have it. My story about the theme of the week, which, if you haven’t figured it out yet, is April Fool’s day. If you haven’t yet realized it yet, April Fool’s Day is tomorrow. So you still have a little bit of time to come up with a good joke. Or, if you’re not good at playing tricks on people, maybe you can surprise them by saying something that sounds outrageous but is actually true.

If you have any good April Fool’s stories, whether they’re real or made up, please share them with us in the comments below.