You don’t need to be a historian to be scratching your head wondering why the French are celebrating Queen’s Day. (Since the French monarchy was so famously abolished over 300 years ago, poor Marie Antoinette.)
In fact, Queen’s Day is the Dutch National Holiday celebrated every year on April 30, even though H.R.H. Queen Beatrix’s birthday is actually in January. Check out the Flickr photo stream of the wild festivities in Amsterdam to get a better idea what Queen’s Day is really all about! You should experience this once in your life, preferably when you are young and single!
This year we left the Netherlands for Bretagne, France on Queen’s Night and decided to export a bit of Queen’s Day (G- rated) fun with us! If you’d like to celebrate wherever you may be, just polish off your favorite crown or tiara, pop open a few Heinekens, and put on your favorite orange outfit!
I can’t claim to have started an actual trend of celebrating Queen’s Day in Bretagne, but it is always fun to share customs and traditions! The seats around our dinner table are never occupied by Americans on Thanksgiving and this year our Christmas Dinner guests happened to be Muslim. If we all started sharing holidays, we might find something worth celebrating every single day!
Don’t forget Cinco de Mayo is only a few days away, so time to whip up some guacamole and start mixing the margaritas!
The tompouce did not travel well!
Suzy Ogé is an American born business woman living in The Hague, The Netherlands. 
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Your export Koninginnedag party seems to have been a hit! They look very cute in their orange gear.
P.S. The orange on those ‘tompouce’ looks slightly off and not that appealing.
With the surprising 30 degree temp on the drive down, it is just lucky that there were no casualties from the orange tompouce! I agree with you and passed!
nice picture… miss them much..
poor tompouce…
Long live exported traditions! Beware food export: speaking of which the Chinese prevented Prime Minister his herring as they did not want him to fall ill with imported raw fish at the opening of the Dutch Pavillion in Shanghai! even though it was imported from Holland by KLM! Ha, ha
Enjoy and see you soon.