Family Day

Last week my parents celebrated their fiftieth wedding day! Can you imagine that? Fifty years of marriage! I'm only just at the beginning of that. 

My brother, sister and I organized a family day as a surprise. Early in the morning we went to my parents with our husbands and wife and the four grand children and woke them up with tooters, whistles and whoops. They were totally suprised (which surprised me in return, because which children would silently let pass by a day like this). 

We first drank coffee and ate the apple pie that I baked (at six in the morning I was busy in my kitchen already, so the pie would be fresh and still a bit warm, which is best for apple pie as we all know).

After coffee and after my parents had dressed we went to the city of Volendam, a little place where people still dress in folkloric costumes, well, at least the older people. Actually the main feature of the city is to let you immortalize in these costumes on photo. There are more than just a couple of photo studios where you can dress up in 'Volendammer klederdracht' as the wear is called. 

We thought it would be nice to have a family photo in 'klederdracht', as my parents have lots of  normal family pictures of us all already. It would be a nice remembrance of this day also, because it's a photo of us all, the whole family, and not just children and grandchildren.

The wear for women in Volendam looks like this (all cities and towns have their own different 'klederdracht', although not every place wore and wears 'dracht'). 

source

 The wear for men, who were mostly fisher men back in the days, as Volendam was near what was called the Zuiderzee (after closing off the part of the sea by the Afsluitdijk it became a lake, called IJsselmeer), looked like in this statue. In the basket sits eel, a long fish that actually looks like a little snake. It's smoked and put on bread rolls or toast.

After making the pictures, which took quite some time, because of changing into the wear and because of it's not that easy to have all people in the picture look nice, smile, stand straight up, look to the camera and such, we went out for lunch.

The lunch was followed by a boat tour through the polder where we lived in our youth. We navigated through the small waters of Broek in Waterland to Watergang and Ilpendam, which is surrounded by grass lands and more or less untouched nature with lots of birds.

 

After the tour we went to Ilpendam, the small town where we grew up, for diner. Because it was a weekday and we all had to work or go to school the next day, we called it a day after the diner, but I think we all had a great time.  

~*~

My Heart Cake is featured by Queen Bee Baker!

Thank you very much, Michele!