Clinking Heineken From 1.5m Away: Amsterdam Celebrates King’s Day With Added Social Distancing

“Vrolijk Koningsdag!” 

Well, sort of. “Vrolijk Woningsdag” is what we’re saying this year, as the national holiday of the Netherlands, King’s Day, has been moved indoors. Thus, “Happy King’s Day” is now “Happy Home’s Day” in an attempt to keep patriotic Dutch citizens, for whom this is the biggest party of the year, at home.

Usually, King’s Day in Amsterdam is chaos. Upwards of a million people crowd into the city from all over the Netherlands, bedecked in the national color, to collectively lose their minds in the streets, on the canals and in the bars. There’s even a word for it: oranjegekte, orange madness. Trains cannot stop at Centraal Station because of the crowds, public transport is marooned on the edge of the Canal Ring and mobile reception becomes a theoretical concept. This year, obviously, will be very different indeed.

When the lockdown measures were introduced over six weeks ago, it was obvious that, barring a miracle, King’s Day could not take place as normal. For Dutch people, the celebration of their Royal Family is less about the King and his coterie as much as it is about a celebration of Dutchness in general: they wear orange, fly flags from their houses and host flea markets in parks all over the nation. 

For a foreigner, this can all seem quite strange. I’m an Irishman, raised in England and I moved to Amsterdam after more than six years in Germany. My nation’s national holiday is widely celebrated, but nowadays falls somewhere between a moment for the diaspora to reconnect with the motherland and a global marketing event for Guinness. In England, St George’s Day passes without so much as a public holiday—it was last week, though you may not have noticed at all—and anyone who celebrates it is more likely to make themselves look like a neo-Nazi than a patriot. Germany’s national day, Einheitstag, at least gets you a day off, but is hardly a bastion of patriotic fervor, precisely because the sort of people who have fanatical amounts of patriotic fervor for Germany…well, you can guess the rest. 

So it jars to see Dutch people so enthused and engaged with their national pride. Perhaps it is because the Dutch are so comfortable in their skins that they can celebrate their Dutchness without it seeming like they’re excluding anyone else. During this crisis, the idea that we are all in this together has led people to coalesce over collective moments, and this might be the biggest test yet of Amsterdammers’ ability to maintain social distancing and enjoy themselves at the same time. King’s Day will still happen, just differently.

As I walked my dog through De Pijp in southern Amsterdam this morning, the flags were still hanging from houses. A queue of shoppers, spaced 1.5m apart, snaked down the street from a fancy bakery, some of them dressed head to toe in orange. If they can keep that up come the 4pm televised toast with King Willem-Alexander, then this King’s Day might not be a write-off after all.