Overall, I pretty much love my job. I must, since I am still an editor after 50-plus years.

I love to write, and I love to tell stories. So my job is perfect for me. Well, most of the time anyway.

But, there is one thing I have to do in my job that I just plain don’t like. In fact, I almost could say that I hate doing it.

What is that thing I dislike so much that you could say I detest it?

Writing an April Fools Day story every year.

There are several reasons why I don’t like it. One is that it truly is fake news, and I worry someone is going to believe it without ever realizing that it is, actually, not true.

Another reason is that it consumes so much of my time. I think about it for most of March, lose sleep over it, get frustrated with it.

After all, it has to be a topic that is believable. The story has to be crafted in a way that makes something not true, seem like it is true. There has to be proof (real or not) that is relayed in the story that makes it seem real.

So while I don’t want to do it, I do want it to be pretty good if I have to do it.

Previous Register publisher Lori Nauman told me in no uncertain terms that doing the April Fools story was a tradition at the Register and part of my job was to see that one runs each and every year.

Every year I tried to talk her out of it, saying I thought it was time to let it die. Every year she said no.

Now that she is retired and in Arizona I thought I might be done with it. I even told the staff that I was pulling the plug on it this year.

But then I got the germ of an idea after talking to Mike McNerney and dang it, I was consumed once more with writing a fake story.

In case you did not notice it last week, it was the story about the senior condos being built on the site of the former Three Sisters buildings.

The staff at the Register was fooled until they read the ending of it.

The response has been the normal responses I always get. Some folks say they were not fooled at all, while others say they were startled or upset about it until they read the last paragraph.

A few have said it is a shame it is not true, except for maybe the shipping container part of the story.

So there is the truth. And once again I am going on record saying that I am not doing an April Fools story in the Register next year. I am officially done with it. After all, most people know it is coming and automatically just check the last paragraph in every single story that is in the Register that comes out the closest to April 1 every year.

Many people have their favorites. It has, after all, been going on for a lot of years. The late Larry Anderson, of Frost, once worked for the Blue Earth newspaper in his younger days, and always claimed to have written the very first April Fools Day story.

That first story was about Faribault County farmers planting pretzels. Yeah, really.

That did get me to thinking. What have the stories all been about? I could not even remember all the topics in the years since I have been here – starting in 2008.

Now, I did not write everyone of them, sometimes it was a reporter, and two times it was a real story that we made look like it was our annual April Fools Day story.

So the following is a short synopsis of April Fools Day stories in the Register over the previous 25 years. The tradition was started way before that, but I only researched them back to 1999. I mean, I do have some other things I have to do each week…like write “real” stories.

2024 – Plans for recreating Lake Oza Tonka in Faribault County are in full swing (story by Kevin Mertens).

2023 – Area county boards consider swapping county names, so that Blue Earth would be in Blue Earth County and Faribault would be in Faribault County.

2022 – Reviving Winnebago’s Wild Bear Feed, in honor of a bear killed by a combine years ago (story by Katie Mullaly).

2021 – Community of Frost erecting giant Frosty the Snowman statue to compete with Blue Earth’s Green Giant, and it will be one foot taller.

2020 – Pandemic causes huge run on beer at the Wells Depot Liquor Store. The story was actually true but it came out on April 1, so it looked like it was our annual AFD story and everyone thought it was.

2019 – Blue Earth and Easton to be the filming sites for a movie based on the John Sandford book ‘Holy Ghost.’

2018 – Faribault County farmers starting a winter pea crop for Seneca. It was written in homage to that first AFD story about planting pretzels.

2017 – Chick-fil-A announces plans for a restaurant in Blue Earth near the AmericInn Motel. Former Blue Earth city administrator Tim Ibisch was terribly upset to find out his favorite restaurant was not coming to Blue Earth.

2016 – Another year when the April Fools Day story was actually 100 percent true. It was all about Preparation H coming to Kiester to make a commercial. There was no need to write a fake story when this story had April Fools Day story written all over it.

2015 – Another story about Kiester, that drilling for oil in the Kiester hills was underway and oil derricks would be coming next and it would be an oil boom. The truth was that oil exploration did once happen in the Kiester hills, years ago.

2014 – Roundabouts were going to be built in downtown Blue Earth as part of the Main Street street project. Sprout statues would be in the center of each one.

2013 – Very valuable old movie reels were found in the basement of the Avalon Theatre right before it was to be demolished.

2012 – The Giant has to be moved when Highway 169 and roundabouts will be built.

2011 – The two county public high schools are changing their names to Faribault County East (formerly USC) and Faribault County West (formerly BEA). School board members got a lot of calls.

2010 – City administrator Kathy Bailey is taking a leave of absence in order to train and compete in World Power Lifting Competition. The true part of the story was that Bailey was indeed a former World Champion power weight lifter.

2009 – Blue Earth’s old water tower was going to be painted to look like a giant pea to match the Green Giant theme.

2008 – The Blue Earth Chamber of Commerce is working on a deal to sell the Green Giant statue to the city of Le Sueur, which has wanted to have it for years to replace their wooden one.

2007 – Large amounts of blue colored earth was found at the site of Blue Earth’s new water tower and will delay the construction of the new tower.

2006 – Blue Earth’s new 4-month old municipal liquor store will have to be moved to somewhere else with the construction of roundabouts on Highway 169.

2005 – The only year there were two AFD stories. One was about Dick Maher becoming a wrestling broadcaster on ESPN and the other was about KBEW’s Royce Murra leaving to work for Fox Sports and Norm Hall leaving to be on CNN.

2004 – The Green Giant’s legs, ankles and feet have become weakened and the statue is now hazardous and in danger of falling and so it will be taken down. Ironically, his feet and legs did become weak, but it was fixed and not demolished.

2003 – Former BEA superintendent Ken Queensland, 75, was picked to come out of retirement and become superintendent again. He had some new ideas like year-round school, that he wanted to implement.

2002 – The town of Frost has landed a new large industry, the Sons of Norway Lutefisk Factory. (The story had input from Larry Anderson, to be sure.)

2001 – A local go-kart club will be using the running track around the Blue Earth Area High School’s Wilson Football Field as a race track for their go-karts this coming summer.

2000 – The Little Brown Jug, the trophy that is awarded to the winner of the Blue Earth Area and Fairmont football game each year, was broken into a hundred pieces when it fell when Rob Norman’s office was being cleaned. It will be replaced by a scented candle in some sort of pot.

1999 – Law enforcement officials are investigating missing farm equipment and even livestock in a triangular area of Faribault County that includes Blue Earth, Winnebago and Delavan. Strange noises and weird lights have been reported being seen in the area. Some farmers believe it could be space aliens.

And there you have it. Twenty-five years of fake news. Of course, the history of the April Fool’s Day stories goes back to the 1970s, we believe. But this should give you the general idea of what they were like.

Including a lot of readers’ favorite AFD story of an amusement park being built in Guckeen, with a dome over it.

Really. Would we lie?