They made it

Everybody finished the four day. I think I should have gotten the clue that this was a much bigger event than I had realized when I went to the grocery store on Day 4 and they had special bouquets just for people who finished it. But you know what? Dutch guys, or at least the ones around here, buy flowers before they buy food, it's like a national mania.* So I didn't think much about it.

Well, on the fourth day, the last bit is not a walk. It's a parade through town complete with cheering throngs**. Then you go to the Big Park and collect your medal.



I gave the kids their medals but was firmly instructed that these are to be kept because when they get older there is some jockeying for position regarding who has the most Four Day Medals, and who started youngest and then they will want to have all of them. Who knew? So they are now safely in the cardboard box which is currently serving me as a jewelry box since the other one was destroyed in the move.

The flowers, which Oma came out to deliver+, are now in the kitchen window. Everyone walks in and immediately says "Oh, who did the Four Day?". I have no idea how they can tell, they look to me like just flowers.

After we were done we all went back to the house along with the people we had walked with and snarfed down the first watermelon of the year, several pots of coffee and tea, and all the baked goods in the house.



* Well, okay, it was once rather famously a national mania. But you know that was a couple centuries ago. If I ever work out a way to work the madness for flowers into my General Theory of Dutch Culture (which is, in short, that geography really is history and the reality of the Looming Sea can affect all kinds of things) I shall write it all up and have social historians peeling my grapes for ever.

** waving flowers of course. And the occasional air horn.

+ It appears that anyone who walked in the Four Day is not allowed to buy flowers for anyone who did, it is bad luck or something. Or possibly Nel just wanted to do it. Well, I think it's bad luck to cross a grandmother, don't you?