Our regular columnist Molly Quell has just returned from holiday and feels a bit criticised by the Dutch for staying at home.
On the first day of our staycation, my husband and I went for a dog walk and ice cream, which was our only plan. When we got home, we happened to run into some acquaintances sitting on their terrace enjoying the sun.
“I’m fine,” I replied when asked how I was. “I’m on vacation.”
“Oh, that’s nice. Where are you going?” they asked.
“Oh, we’re not going anywhere. We’re just staying home.”
They looked at me in disbelief, then at my Dutch husband as if they had made a translation error.
“That’s… nice,” one of them replied, though their tone suggested they didn’t actually think it was a good idea.
I travel a lot for work. When I returned from my last trip, which lasted five weeks, my husband calculated that I hadn’t been home for a single week in the entirety of 2024. For me, a good time doesn’t involve shoving my elbows through the blue screens at Schiphol Airport or fighting with Deutsche Bahn for a refund for yet another delayed train.
But you don’t need to work as much as I do to enjoy spending your holidays at home, and the Dutch seem to think it’s a violation of your human rights to stay in their country when you’re free from work.
Random friends I bumped into weren’t the only ones who couldn’t voice their opinions: “You’re going to take a proper vacation later, right?”, “Did you go anywhere in the spring?”, “You can still book,” or prying, “Oh, are you OK?” as if I were confessing to my neighbors then and there that I’d lost all my money in a Ponzi scheme and couldn’t afford a decent vacation.
The Netherlands is a small country that lacks the things we often enjoy on holiday – sun, mountains, good food, friendly people – so it’s understandable why you might want to go abroad.
What I don’t understand is the criticism of my choice not to do so: the only thing cheaper than pitching a tent in a mediocre French campsite and eating my own homemade peanut butter on my own homemade bread is to not go anywhere in the first place: save yourself 40 euros a night sitting on dry dirt between three other Dutch families with screaming kids and eat your peanut butter at home.
What’s more, it will be one less car causing massive traffic jams on France’s highways.
The COVID-19 pandemic has seen an increase in the use of the word “staycation.” It’s just that the Dutch have adopted the English term. The pandemic restrictions have caused people to push the boundaries of the definition. While a staycation means staying at home, enterprising travel agents and people bored by lockdown have decided that it’s actually a vacation where you stay in your own country.
In a normal-sized country, this is nonsense: if you live in Milwaukee and go to New York City for the weekend, you can’t stay anywhere, and if you spend the weekend on the island of Texel, you can’t stay there (unless you live on Texel).
good point
Staying at home has some huge advantages: You don’t have to pack, you don’t have to go through the emotionally devastating process of choosing which books to take, you don’t have to translate labels at the grocery store, you can use your favorite mug, and more.
Summer in this country is not so bad. The weather is terrible but the weather here is always terrible and summer may not be so bad. Sometimes we even see the sun like this week.
It’s also cheap: an ice cream cone in the Netherlands might have cost about the same as in the south of France or Italy, but you didn’t have to pay to go to the store to get it.
Maybe this will be the next big lifestyle trend. Forget nikksen, everyone is blijven now.
