Tweet23-12-2011 om 23:32 by Sueli Brodin

There are times in the Netherlands when I have the impression that it has become an English speaking country. This is definitely the case around Christmas when all the songs we hear in the shops, in the streets, on the airwaves and just about everywhere else, except perhaps in churches, are of British or American origin.

At the gym this morning, the spinning instructor played Wham's Last Christmas twice and continued with Chris Rea's Driving home for Christmas and José Feliciano's I wanna wish you a Merry Christmas.



My youngest daughter Sacha learned to dance on Maria Carey's unavoidable hit All I want for Christmas is you at her Street Dance class and the way she's practising it, I expect her to  be able to sing it any time soon.



There was a big Christmas celebration yesterday evening at my children's school and I was surprised to see that every single performance would have been an English song or piece of music, had the last group of children not broken the pattern by singing the traditional Dutch Christmas song O Dennenboom.



My daughter Naomi and her friends played and sang Jingle Bells and We wish you a Merry Christmas, and so did many other children. The choice of songs seemed to be rather limited between these two pieces and Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer, which they performed over and over again, in many variations and with all sorts of different instruments.

When I asked my Dutch husband why the children kept singing the same songs in English and why they didn't sing any song in Dutch, he told me that most traditional Dutch Christmas songs except for O Dennenboom were either outdated or heavily religious, and that Jingle Bells and We wish you a Merry Christmas were the most popular Christmas songs in  Dutch non-religious public schools.



He told me some of the titles of the songs he had learned as a child at the Protestant Reformed Christian school he used to go to - Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht, Nu zijt wellekome, Er is een kindeke geboren - and said that there were many others, all in Dutch and all connected to the birth of Jesus Christ. "So you see, they're not very appropriate for secular public schools," he explained.



After all the singing and performing, it was time for a warm Christmas dinner and Sacha took her seat next to her new good friend who recently joined her class. I thought to myself that he must have felt pleasantly at home all evening, because his mother is from England and he speaks fluent English.

As for me, if someone had told me that we were actually in the UK or in the United States, I think I would have believed them on the spot and without any hesitation, because there had hardly been any sign to the contrary.

I wish you a Merry Christmas,
I wish you a Merry Christmas,
I wish you a Merry Christmas
and a Happy New Year!

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