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It’s been more than a month that I posted, so it’s high time for a few posts to catch up with what happened in May.

In some countries, like Denmark, flying the national flag is some kind of generic thing to mark joyful occasions. So if it’s someone’s birthday, you’d fly the national flag to celebrate! But in the Netherlands our protocols and customs surrounding the flag are much more restrictive, and flying the flag for your birthday is ‘not done’. You only fly the flag for national holidays and birthdays of the royal family.

The only exception is when you’ve cleared your exams for your secondary education — then you’d fly the flag and tie your schoolbag to the flag pole — because you’re not needing it anymore! But that, too, is understood to be a breach of official protocol.

This is also why the ‘wimpel’ is so popular in the Netherlands — it is not governed by the flag protocol, so you can fly it any way you want!

But if your birthday is on a national holiday, such as Liberation Day on May 5th, then flying the flag comes kind of “built in”!

When I was about to have my fifth birthday, a neighbour from across the street learned of it. She told me that she would fly the flag specifically for my birthday! And of course I went to check first thing in the morning, and lo and behold: there was the flag! (Of course I understood that she only did it because it was a national holiday, but I also understood that she might have had a different intention from the other people flying the flag that day.)

I wrote about buying a flag for ourselves some time ago, and this was a good occasion! So we proudly flew the flag for Liberation Day, but also, secretly, for my 50th birthday…

My parents and klik’s mother and sister visited. I had done a lot of baking: I replicated the strawberry mousse tartlettes that I made for Christmas dinner, and we had those with a glass of (alcohol-free) bubbles. I also made sable cookies with a ganache filling: matcha cookies with a white chocolate-vanilla filling and a chocolate cookie with a coffee ganache. I also baked chocolate chip cookies after Dorrie Greenspan’s recipe, but I didn’t add any nuts this time, because the next day we would have a visitor with a nut allergy. (And I also add a hefty splash of cinnamon too, really makes the flavour pop!)

I had made rendang (an Indonesian beef stew) for dinner, which we served with fries. And we had panna cotta for dessert.

Usually I will leave the celebrations at that, but since I was turning 50, I had decided to also invite some dear friends for an afternoon tea the next day. We had been preparing the shopping and cooking for a week in advance…