Santa's village

I found him. The bugger was hiding right under our very noses. The whole idea that he would choose to live at the North pole was crazy to begin with. Who wouldn't choose warm an' sunny California over the toe freezing, cold catching, teeth clattering North pole? But enough of this. I found him, and even though I did not visit the place, my imagination of it makes it an unnecessary and possibly even insensible journey. After all: Santa's got better things to do.

I imagine elves flying around, tinkering with flowers and playing hopscotch on lily pads, until Grumpy (having enough of this merry scene) manages to trip one smack-bang in the middle of the pond. I imagine Rudolph frolicking about, playing hide and seek, which seems silly because his nose can be spotted from miles away. But that doesn't matter, cause he's playing with Dopey, who wouldn't be able to find his own ears lest he was standing on them. 

Meanwhile, Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Dunder, and Blixem attend to more serious matters, cleaning the sleigh karate-style - wax on, wax off - . Mrs. Claus, the real housewife of California, wholeheartedly engages in her task of reading the daily letters composed of endless, crooked written wish lists written by all the children in the world, filing them not only alphabetically, but also based on area of interest, price range, and presence of dyslexia. In what little time remains - though she never minds this, secretly even loves her time consuming, indispensable role - she applies calligraphy to write the names of said children in Santa's big and dusty book 'Naughty 'n Nice'. Occasionally, she glances out of the kitchen window, and catches a glimpse of chipmunks Chip and Dale (Knabbel en Babbel voor de Nederlandse lezertjes) who are having a private pool party in Santa's spray ground. Whereas some of the more serious villagers frown upon this questionable behavior, among which the above mentioned Grumpy, Mrs. Claus knows that Santa actually loves their exuberant demeanor. Chip and Dale took on their share of the work, planting the seeds of the Christmas trees earlier in the year, and it is only fair to let them steam off some of their excess energy. This does not mean that Santa overlooked the fact that Chip munched on some of the seeds whilst planting them, and that Dale keeps a secret stash of them in his tree, causing the orchard to have a slightly haphazard feel to it. Santa did not need Snoopy to rat on them, although Snoopy, being Santa's eyes, ears, and nose especially, showed his true colors and zealous nature upon hearing about this from Sleepy, who is not at all what he seems to be, sleepy that is. But, as one may have gathered by now, Santa has a little soft spot for Chip and Dale.

If you listen carefully, you can probably hear his hearty, boisterous bursts of laughter when Chip and Dale, employing Super Soakers as sprinklers for the orchard, turn against Santa, after which the whole village engages in a merry water fight. HO HO HO.

Double duties: patriotism

You might assume that moving abroad would have all kinds of benefits. And it does. But you should not dismiss the double duties we are also faced with. Or did you think that the Tax Authorities would just forget about us? No no, we are among the lucky few who get to fill out both the USA tax forms and the Dutch tax forms. And the Dutch forms need to be filled out on paper. Not just Any paper, Many paper(s). But in all fairness I need to admit that the Dutch Tax Authorities' slogan 'we can't make it any more fun, but we can make it easier' can be applied internationally. The USA tax forms are not an improvement of any kind.

But so far for taxes. The real hardships of our life here are the patriotic problems we encounter on a daily basis. The latest of our double Ds or double Ps was the 4th of July. We decided to pay tribute to the USA with a Dutch zest, so to speak.

So, it is with great pride that I present to you:

4th of July, the Dutch way*:

*of course, since helmets are mandatory for kids in California, there was just a hint of USA in our Dutch way. I say mix 'n match, let there be peace between our countries.

Queen's day in the USA

Contrary to our personal tradition in The Netherlands, we did actually celebrate Queen's day last week. In San Francisco. Is there a celebration, I hear you say. Yes! Is it any good, I hear you say. No, but is it ever? Were there any people, I hear you say? Yes, of course there were. But were they actually Dutch? Yes, even that happened to be the case. As it so happens, the place was packed with Dutch people. And also with San Franciscanians, San Franciscosians, San Francisthigamees, who wanted to see what all the fuss was about. "Those crazy Dutchmen again. Why didn't they stay home in Denmark? Go back to where you came from. But leave the Hågelsläg." So what does Queen's day in San Francisco entail? Well, I could make this a very long and dreary story, but I won't. Similarly to Queen's day in Holland, people tend to dress up in orange, make a lot of fuss about nothing, play really loud, nasty Dutch tear jerkers, drink a lot of beer, have a flea market and bike decoration challenge, eat cheese and herring, and be proud of their Dutch heritage. But to add just a zest of American flavor to Queen's day, there were at least two minor alterations:

1.
Designated beer drinking areas. Designated as in design or something, because the designated area was fenced off with a cute white garden fence about knee high. Just high enough to stumble over after a couple of beers probably. The result of this: a lot of Dutchies huddling together with beer spilling everywhere, and some really adventurous Dutchies succumbing to the craving to find out how far they could cross the fence frontier until they really pissed off the policeman standing there. Which apparently was not far at all. Mind you, I did not succumb to the craving myself. Although I did find out that you are allowed to drink your beer standing inside the designated drinking area, while your hand that actually holds the alcoholic poison (and thus the actual poison itself) is not inside the drinking area. Bad, bad me.

2.
Having to sign in order for your kid to participate in the Dutch sack race (zaklopen). Because beware the day one of the participating children actually trips over the sack and falls. I actually though that was part of the game, and that you are disqualified if tripping does not happen. But hey, at least they did not make parents sign their name in blood. Or in the blood of their children.

But to be fair, it was a lot of fun to see a whole lot of Dutch people over here. And another advantage to this whole Queen's day in the USA is that we might get Lucas to recognize orange as orange instead of brown, which he insists it is.

To dabble in scrabble

Instead of a pseudo-scientific blog, I thought I'd try a folkore blog with us being in a different culture and all. The problem is that I have not seen many folkloristic/cultural things here (if you don't count the occasional American flag, or patriotic car sticker). So you have to settle for old traditional board games. Enter Scrabble. Of all the nice games we have (Colonists, Munchkin, Carcassonne and such), Scrabble is just an old favourite. It's loads of fun to try to create long, weird words that boggle your mind and the mind of your opponent ("Is that even a word?"). Since we've moved to California we agreed that Scrabble should be played in English rather than Dutch. This made me question whether the distribution of letters would differ for both languages. I know you would agree with me that this is something that would fit smugly within the category of 'useless knowledge', but here it comes. The frequence of almost all letters differs for both languages, but the most notable differences can be found in the letters E and N (which have the highest frequency in the Dutch version), and the letters A and I (which have the highest frequency in the English version). When you think about it, it's not so strange, since these letters have high frequency in either Dutch or English. By the way, did you know that if you play all seven letters on your plate, it's called Bingo?
We admit to having cheated for an English word with the letter X. This also happens to be the letter which Lucas has learned last week.

In the category learning English, this is what Lucas came up with:

"Mag ik een toesjoe?" (by which he probably refers to a tissue)

For plain-old Dutch phrases:

Sinosaurus (his favourite animal at the moment)

So, maybe I should stick with pseudo-scientific blogs, right?