Jetten is wrong, we don’t need another May holiday

Our regular columnist Molly Quell’s stinging rebuke of Prime minister Rob Jetten’s proposal to make Liberation Day a public holiday might send him back to hospital for follow up treatment. 

Is it wrong to kick a man while he’s down? It is not, I feel, when he is this incorrect about something.

Having been stung by a jellyfish, I am sympathetic to Jetten’s current plight as he recovers from an allergic reaction to an attack by a sea creature while swimming in the Caribbean.

But before he left the safety of the Netherlands, whose waters are mostly infested with sea foam not sea life, Jetten made an outrageous proposal.

The Netherlands’ youngest-ever prime minister suggested the country make Liberation Day a public holiday.

Speaking at an event in Utrecht during May 5 festivities, Jetten said he wanted to look at making the day a national public holiday.

At present, it’s only a public holiday once every five years. The last time was 2025, so you have to wait until 2030 to get another day in May free.

Here is the thing: you absolutely do not need another holiday in May. No one in the Netherlands needs another holiday in May. All the holidays are already in May.

The stingy Dutch only have seven public holidays, the lowest in Europe and just one more than the United States (a country widely known for the worst work-life balance in the galaxy.)

You start off the year strong with New Year’s Day free. Then there’s a huge gap until Easter rolls around.

As I am sure you have realised, the date of Easter is not fixed. Why does the day that Jesus rose from the dead change every year?

Without getting any sort of theological discussion, Christian tradition says that Jesus rose from the dead on the first Sunday following the feast of Passover. Determining the date of Passover is even more complicated and early Christians did not like being beholden to rabbis to figure out when their momentous holiday was so they decided that Easter would always be the first Sunday after the Paschal full moon.

What’s the Paschal full moon? Great question. I have no idea. The point is that Easter always falls between March 22 and April 25.

Then King’s Day, which is always on April 27 at least as long as Willem-Alexander is the royal-in-chief. The next in line, Amelia, is born on December 7 so maybe we will have to combine flea markets and Christmas markets in a few years.

That brings us to May where you get Ascension Day and first and second Pentecost. They also move, because of the whole Easter debacle.

And then we have nothing, not one single free day, nary an afternoon off, until Christmas.

On May 5, 1945, Prince Bernhard accepted the capitulation of all German forces in the Netherlands. The day before German Admiral von Friedeburg surrendered to the British on behalf of the German troops, but I get you want to celebrate the win that happened on home turf.

Obviously this is a very important day and we should take time every year to remember those who fought and died to defeat fascism, especially in this day and age.

But we could do that on August 15, the date that marks the end of the Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies and the end of World War II. That’s when all of the Netherlands was liberated, not just the part in Europe.

Until the German invasion, Waterloo Day, commemorating the end of the Napoleonic Wars, was a holiday. Rather than celebrate the end of both wars, the Netherlands took away June 18 as a public holiday and replaced it (sorta) with May 5.

The jokes about stinginess just write themselves.

Keti Koti, which marks the date when slavery was abolished in Suriname in 1863, could be a contender as another public holiday though that’s celebrated on July 1 and perhaps we want to avoid a summer public holiday when everyone is off anyway.

I polled some of my Dutch News colleagues who had some other suggestions. How about Sinterklaas on December 5?

Maybe Prinsjesdag? The annual presentation of the budget on the third Tuesday of September that has great hats and great horses. A perfect celebration day.

Ironically, both Kristallnacht and the fall of the Berlin Wall happened on November 9, which is now celebrated as the International Day Against Fascism and Antisemitism. I think we could use some more opposition to both these days.

My personal suggestion? October 3. In celebration of the most iconic and beloved Dutch meme: Mijn Tweet Klopt. The day the former immigration minister Marjolein Faber declared, falsely, that her social media post claiming the suspect in a Groningen stabbing had a “north African appearance” was correct, despite the witnesses and the victim saying the attacker was white.

This country needs a public holiday in the fall and what better use of a free day than to be reminded that if you make up racist lies, your legacy will be to be an embarrassing meme.

Or, considering how few public holidays we get, let’s just do both.