Though as an unexpectedly fervent patriot I must admit to believing my country has the drop on most others in a lot of fields, there’s one essential aspect in which most every country in the world outdoes The Netherlands without effort.

The United States have the Fourth. The French celebrate le Quatorze Juliet. As a matter of fact, most every nation in the world has a day like that; even Burkina Faso can point to the 5th of August.

But The Netherlands have no birth date!

Or rather, we have too many. Perhaps that’s why we have two national holidays – neither of which have a single thing to do with the birth of the nation.

For one, we celebrate Queen’s Day, the birthday of our Head of State Queen Beatrix, on April 30th. Oddly enough, that date is the birth date of our current Queen’s mother Juliana, who abdicated way back in 1980 and has been dead since 2004, and wasn’t even close to being our first monarch.

For another, we celebrate Liberation Day on May 5th. But while that date does mark the end of the German Occupation in 1945, you’ll find no historian mad or confused enough to claim that the Kingdom of the Netherlands only came into existence after WOII.

But what, then, should be the birth date of our nation? Looking into the matter more closely only gets me more confused:

• On March 16, 1815, the United Kingdom of the Netherlands was officially founded, with King Willem I as its first monarch. However, that version of the Kingdom was a monstrocity that included present-day Belgium.
• It was fifteen years later, on October 4th, 1830, that Belgium gained independence. Would that, then, be a good date to mark the birth of this nation?
• Not quite. It took until 1839 before the present-day borders of the mainland Netherlands were established.
• And even that isn’t quite accurate; up until 1890, when King Willem III died, our monarch was also head of state of the Duchy of Luxemburg.
• And then there’s the matter of the Bylaws of the Kingdom, which clarify the status of our former West-Indies colonies and thus truly establish what the Kingdom of the Netherlands is about. Those were initiated in 1942 by Queen Wilhelmina and passed as late as October 28th, 1954.

This simply will not do. The Netherlands need a birth date. Therefore, I hereby move to have Queen Beatrix make March 16, 1815, the national birth date by Royal Decree.

That should give us enough time to prepare a proper celebration of the Bicentennial…