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AMSTERDAM Dutch government officials decided that this week—the week leading up to St. Patrick’s Day—would be the perfect time to take a little attention away from the Irish and announce that, this year, the Dutch will begin to celebrate a competing holiday. This holiday will be called Jan VanHaaken (pronounced “Yahn Van H-ah-ken”) Day.
Jan VanHaaken Day will be officially celebrated by all Dutch people—and, hopefully, by everyone around the world—each year on August 20th. Its purpose is to celebrate a great Dutch hero, who invented the garage sale in 1699. In a moment of inspiration, Jan realized that his neighbors—especially those really cheap Dutch people, who wash their paper plates and paper towels and reuse them—would be overjoyed (and maybe even break into a sweat) if he put all of his old junk in his carriage house and offered it to them at a really, really low price. He knew that all of his neighbors would buy his used, worthless junk—even if they had no use for it—just because it was so cheap. He also realized that, by selling all of this worthless junk, he would make a ton of money—money that he could even use to buy a new set of paper plates.
When asked about the competition with the Irish, Dutch government official Hans TenBroeke commented, “Think about it. Who really cares about some guy who got rid of some snakes? But garage sales! Now that’s a reason to celebrate!”
In honor of this great moment in Dutch history, Dutch people—and other really cheap people everywhere—will celebrate by throwing large parties, at which everyone will eat pigs in the blanket and things called “fat balls” (on paper plates, of course).
To get the rest of the world to take part in this celebration, the Dutch government has announced that the holiday will also include the consumption of large amounts of beer and (for the daring) a deadly Dutch gin called jenever. They had considered dying their alcohol in a nice Dutch blue but decided against it, since it would cost extra money.
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