Queens Day / Koninginnedag : or is it Orange Crazy Day?
April 30th – Queen’s Day is a national holiday here in the Netherlands. It is a celebration for the birthday of the Queen of the Netherlands (Queen Juliana’s birthday). The date has been retained as Queen Beatrix birthday is in January – not good weather for a party in all the streets of the Netherlands.
Queen’s Day is also world famous (in the Netherlands?) for the Orange Craze.
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- Orange Boat – orange guests
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- Queens Day Cake Shop Display in Orange
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- Orange Hair Day – Seller
These pictures are from “About.com” Take a look to see more.
People wear orange clothing, hats, orange boas and other quite interesting creative orange accessories. The Royal household is the House of Orange so there will be orange banners, orange coloured foods & drinks, orange cards, orange everywhere. So if you will be in the Netherlands on April 30th do bring at the very least your orange t-shirt. If you should forget there will many orange offerings for sale on the street from g-strings, to cowboy hats and everything between.
On Queen’s Day there is also a “freemarket” (Dutch: vrijmarkt) all over the country, where everybody is allowed to sell anything they wish in the streets. Last year the streets of Haarlem were lined with stalls and groundsheets and tables laden with everything and anything that you could imagine for sale somewhere. Children selling toys they have outgrown, people baked cakes and sold them, oranges, orange juice, clothing, books, records, videos, cd’s, tapes, car bits, tv’s, kitchen stuff, jewellery, junk – absolutely anything can be sold on this day. There were miles and miles of sellers.
They do not allow garage sales here – so they have this free market day once a year as well as other fleamarkets where you can sell your surplus whatever that might be. Queens Day was great and this year I am really looking forward to it. Last year we didn’t know quite what to expect – even though we had seen people preparing for it for the week before by starting to wear orange items and many shops had wonderful orange displays.
If you come to the Netherlands at the time of any one of their amazing celebrations – check out the shop windows, they make such an effort and the art and design of them is quite incredible. We had been told the Dutch are stoic and do not know how to celebrate – that is a serious lie. I have never seen so much celebration.
Maybe this is just not the right day for a Knit art Graffitti installation on a Ball in Haarlem.
Tags: Ball Warmer, canal, celebrations, freemarket, graffiti, Knit art Graffiti, knitting, Orange Craze, Orange Day, Queens Day, Urban Art, weather
