Live News From Spain As It Happens

 December 28 is the national equivalent of April Fool's, and you can expect all types of attempts to pull the wool over your eyes over the next 24 hours.

Yesterday was Holy Innocents' Day on the Catholic calendar, and actually, it's not funny at all. It's a day for remembering children who never made it to adulthood, and is usually marked by mass in their honour – in fact, in Tudor Britain and late-Mediaeval Spain, this was a big event, because infant mortality was so high that almost every family would have experienced the loss of a child at least once.

But to lighten the mood, Spain has long marked the occasion by honouring children in the second-best way possible: the first would be giving the living ones presents, but they get plenty of those on Christmas Eve night and the night of January 5 when the Three Kings visit; the second is acting as childishly as possible.

Playing practical jokes on people, making them look daft and having a laugh at their expense is a great way to find your inner child, and if you're a victim, the best reaction is to laugh at yourself for falling for it.

Clearly, in these days of 'fake news', the media has largely stopped the tradition of including spoof stories on December 28 – it's considered bad taste now, and one could argue that sometimes, what we've read in the press in the last few years has often been stranger than fiction, making Inocentadas, as these practical jokes are known, almost redundant.