Queen's day

April 30 is Queen’s Day in the Netherlands. It’s the day when Dutch people celebrate the birthday of the queen, whose birthday happens to be in January. Her mother’s birthday, however, was April 30, and to commemorate her mother, and probably because the weather is so much nicer at the end of April, Queen Beatrix decided to maintain April 30 as Queen’s Day.

Several people have asked me if the Dutch are very pro-monarchy since we have dedicated a special day to the royal family, and I can never seem to explain the phenomenon properly. I always seem to repeat phrases such as “sack races” “alcohol” “orange”, and “silly hats”.
To be honest, I’ve never thought of the Dutch are very much in love with their royal family, so then why this sudden explosion of patriotism? On Queen’s Day, half of the Dutch population seems to develop this desire to spend several hours in front of the television watching the royal family travel to small obscure towns jumping with excitement to treat the queen and her family to fun-filled activities such as jeans-hanging competitions, a local art exhibition, sack races, and dancing the salsa with overexcited locals dressed in orange. The other half of the Dutch population will venture into town, which will have been decorated with enough orange to make any Halloween party seem subdued. Here they can be treated to similar activities, only without the added glamour of a royal family. Children can join in games like bobbing for apples and the three-legged race, while adults can sit on benches hastily erected for the occasion, drink alcohol in the middle of the day, and listen to a wide variety of musical expressions, from opera to rock bands to church choirs. To top it all of, most Dutch people will feel the sudden urge to don bright orange clothing, including enormous hats, large sunglasses, and inflatable crowns.

Perhaps this sudden outburst of patriotic joy can be attributed the otherwise almost puritan nature of the Dutch people: “Just act normal, and you’ll be crazy enough” is an often heard expression. If a people get so little opportunity to let their hair down, it’s a definite possibility that when they do, they literally paint the town, well, orange, obviously.

Living overseas makes the whole Queen’s Day experience very different. When I was a kid, our parents would take us to events featuring hordes of Dutch people we had never met before (and would not see for the remainder of the year). These events were always far more patriotic than anything I had been to in The Netherlands; imagine a line of twenty cars driving into the mountains behind Grasse, France, each of them sporting a Dutch flag waving out the window, and a group of forty people without any kind of prompting, spontaneously bursting into the national anthem before a potluck dinner held in an empty field. Absence definitely makes the heart grow fonder.
Today the celebration is not quite as festive, mainly because it’s a weekday, and I’m in the middle of finals (another oft-heard expression in Dutch is “business before the girl”). I did replace our American flag with our Dutch flag last night though, while very quietly, and somewhat absent-mindedly (I think after three lines, I turned into “the star-spangled banner”) humming the Dutch anthem. Now all I’m waiting for is an unsuspecting neighbor to ask me why I have an “open” flag hanging off my porch, or to wonder which state we’re from. I also told those students who have to take their final today that if they wore orange, I would give them one bonus point on their exam. And I pulled out the brightest orange blazer the world has ever seen. No sack-races, bobbing for apples, or drinking wine while listening to St. Agnes’ women’s choir. But the sun is shining, I’ve seen pictures of the royal family ice-skating and, yes, dancing the salsa, and life is pretty good anyway.