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Time off and a healthy lifestyle are driving some young Americans to Europe: 'You are a person first and a worker 2nd'
(www.businessinsider.com)
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25 years I’ve been abroad (The Netherlands) and the work-life balance is why I stayed. They insist I take days off (still foolishly work like an American) and have already booked out a 3 week vacation for later in the year…and I’ll still have nearly 2 weeks of vacation left. We can roll a few weeks of vacation over to the next year if not used. Even though the Dutch have NO holidays from June to Christmas, I’m still able to take 4 day weekends when I want to.
The downside is family left behind may begin to resent you. My family have developed this red-hat victim culture. I can’t bring up how I live abroad or else it starts fights - they don’t want to talk to me now.
I also moved to the Netherlands recently (but from Germany) and their holiday schedule feels really weird to me. You get a lot from April to June and then nothing until Christmas. They should've spaced that out better.
You do know that most public holidays are based on christian events right? Spacing those out is only possible if we separate those days from religion.
The statuary minimum holiday entitlement of 20 days (most employers give 25+) can be used freely.
I mean, to be fair, many of those holidays aren't actually based on when Christian events happened. It's usually more like co-opting an already existing pagan holiday, and forcing it to fit into some story about their religion. It's often not even in the same fucking season of when an actual event in Christianity may have happened (if at all).
Heh, even here in the home of Christianity we have multiple secular holidays: liberation day, workers' day, republic day, ferragosto ...
Cool thing is, you can even make up holidays if you want!
I mean, they kinda place King's/Queen's Day how it suits them. And there are possible Christian holidays in the second half of the year as well.
FYI: King’s day is celebrated on the king’s birthday. Not on some randomly selected day.
Sure, that's why they kept it at the 30.4., when Beatrix got queen, who has her birthday on 31.1.
Except for Queen Beatrix’s birthday which was originally in January and her mother's was in September, but both of them celebrated Queen’s day in April.
So they really move the date around as it is convenient to be a nicer celebration.