Every May 5th here in Holland, they celebrate Liberation Day. There's no real Independence Day here as there is in the US, since I'm not aware that Holland declared independence from anyone (I might be corrected here). In fact, as a former colonial power, there are probably many countries that celebrate Independence Day from Holland!
So the closest thing we have here is the day Holland was liberated from the Nazis in 1945 by the combined armies of the US, Canada and the British after a 5 year brutal occupation.
The sad thing is that although it is a national holiday, you only get an extra day off every 5 years. It falling on a Monday this year meant that we had to celebrate it on Sunday, which we did. On a warm and sunny day, Margreet and I strapped Noa in the car seat and drove the hour and a half to Den Bosch in the south of Holland, where Margreet's older brother Freek (pron. Frake) lives with wife Helen and daughter Hannah.
We saw a funny thing along the way to Den Bosch. We passed a US military convoy. This convoy, however, was made up of a military jeep and half a dozen motorcycles, all dated back to WWII and manned probably by Dutch collectors. On the lead jeep waved a large US flag. In fact, all over the country, you could find people waving or planting US, Canadian and British flags on Liberation Day. Very nice to see that over 60 years after liberation, the Dutch are very grateful to these countries.
In Den Boshch, we met Margreet's whole family (including 5 of the 6 granddaughters), sat on the patio, chillin', drinkin', playing a little football (uh, I mean soccer?), running after all the children, then had a nice chinese dinner. I was quizzed on whether I knew all 12 of the Dutch provinces, and with a little help from Margreet's mother, Riek, I did pretty well :)
We made a couple of nice photos of the family day out.
Click here to see the rest of the photos from that day.
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