At Christmas I always think about Knock Knock Who’s there, a picture book I read as a child. It’s kind of a reverse Christmas story: while Mary and Joseph are not welcome anywhere, in Knock Knock Who’s there one after another, marmot got lost in the woods of a friendly bear on a foggy winter’s day. The bear is fine with it and serves the marmot soup from a gigantic pan that happened to be already on the fire.
Normally on Boxing Day I give a dinner for the lost marmots among my friends; sometimes they in turn take a marmot with them. Fortunately, my dining table has two extendable leaves.
You don’t think about some values until they are threatened. Hospitality is one of those values. I think it’s a nice quality to be open to (unexpected) visitors, like the bear in the book. This is normal practice in many cultures. Eva Oude Elferink, until recently a correspondent in New Delhi, told me that strangers in India are seen as an asset. “If you know someone for two minutes, they will take you to a house party.”
In the Netherlands it is different. I still regularly think of a friend with whom I played a lot in my childhood. As the afternoon drew to a close, food odors spread through the house and her mother said, “Floor, we’re going to eat in a minute, so…” Get out, she meant: our dining table is the domain of the family, not passers-by. Another friend’s mother once said that unfortunately I couldn’t keep eating because she had already bought four meatballs: too little to feed me, the fifth. Unfortunately!
Hospitality is not a basic value in the Netherlands, but something from the expansion package. People who are hospitable often see this as part of their identity. They couldn’t be themselves for the last two years. Sometimes hospitality was literally against the rules, sometimes it was legal, but not innocent. The more souls, the more joy and the more chance of infection. It hurts to look at people that way, I think.
If I think it’s so bad, what is it like for people from countries where hospitality is really important? Do they also have a less carefree door policy than before corona? I asked a number of (former) correspondents of NRC. My short summary: in countries such as India, Indonesia, Turkey and Spain there is less skimping on social contact. Well during the first wave, when everyone was scared, but not so much after that. It is “unnatural” for Indians not to invite people, says Eva Oude Elferink. When the Delta Wave died down, they resumed their old habits. Also for Indonesians, it goes “against their nature to invite a limited number of people,” says Annemarie Kas, who was in Jakarta until September. In Spain, the old hospitality is also back, says correspondent Oumaima Abalhaj, who contracted corona last week at a party where she knew no one. “I had met those people twice and was immediately invited.”
Will it also be the same in the Netherlands? I doubt it. The Telegraph reported on Thursday that ‘life with corona’ is being considered in The Hague. “It is better to get together with a lot of family in the summer,” it says, for example. Suddenly I’m afraid that especially in individualistic cultures such as the Netherlands, hospitality will erode even more. That the people who weren’t crazy about uninvited guests anyway, now have an excuse to keep them out; and that the hospitable people lose their open-mindedness. Hospitality will soon become a summer virtue: in the summer the marmots are welcome, in the winter they stand in front of a closed door.
I don’t think I can get used to that. My Boxing Day dinner was canceled last year, and also this year I can invite fewer people than I would like. Next year I want to run out of chairs, plates and cutlery again. And then say, like the bear in the forest house: “Come and sit by the stove, boys, the soup is ready.”
Floor Rusman ([email protected]) is editor of NRC
A version of this article also appeared in NRC Handelsblad of 24 December 2021
A version of this article also appeared in NRC in the morning of December 24, 2021
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