Check It Out: Complaining is free; gratitude costs extra

By Joan Janzen

The ability to complain is a free option every human being is equipped with at birth. I remember watching a four-year-old sitting at a picnic table with her grandparents, ready to have lunch. Her older brother was playing with the grandparents’ dog, intent on dragging the pooch into the nearby pond. Meanwhile Gramma was unloading food from a take-out bag and handed a hamburger to her granddaughter.

The girl pouted and yelled, “I want a hotdog!” Her grandpa gently reminded her that she had asked him to order her a hamburger. The little girl peeked inside the hamburger bun and gasped, “You put yellow stuff on it! I don’t like yucky yellow stuff!”

“It’s OK; we can fix that,” Grampa piped up. He began scraping off the mustard and hiding any traces of it with additional ketchup. No doubt, he was doing his best to avoid a temper tantrum – hers, not his. After he was done, he cautiously returned the hamburger to its owner and breathed a sigh of relief when the preschooler took a bite, chewed and swallowed.

Grampa rolled his eyes, and muttered to his wife, “I thought it was over after the terrible twos.”

The temptation to complain comes easily to each one of us; however, gratitude usually costs us time and consideration. Every October for more than eighty years, Canada has been the recipient of a gift of gratitude which has been passed down through the generations. Let me share the story …

Every October you’ll find people kneeling in flower beds at Commissioners Park in Ottawa busily pushing tulip bulbs into the dirt. And every October 20,000 tulip bulbs arrive from the Netherlands, a gift from the Dutch royal family and the Dutch bulb growers. The shipments started right after WWII and have never stopped, and every May the tulips bloom in preparation for the annual tulip festival.

In 1940 Germany invaded the Netherlands; five days later the Dutch army surrendered. Crown Princess Juliana took her two little girls across the Atlantic to Ottawa. In 1941 they settled in the current official residence of the Leader of the Opposition. One of those little girls (Beatrix) attended public school in Ottawa and later on in life wore the Dutch crown. In January 1943 Princess Juliana gave birth to a baby girl, which is why some of the tulip bulbs are planted in front of the hospital.

German occupiers cut off food shipments to the big Dutch cities. By January 1945 the official food ration was 500 calories a day. In February food rations dropped to 340 calories a day. People traded wedding rings for potatoes, and ate tulip bulbs that had once made the Netherlands famous worldwide. Now the Dutch peeled them, boiled them, ground the bulbs into flour and served them in soup. About 20,000 people died from starvation during that time period.

While the west starved, the Canadian army was fighting its way across the country, with 175,000 Canadians serving in the nine-month campaign to free the Netherlands. More than 7,000 soldiers were killed, and on May 5, 1945, the German forces in the Netherlands surrendered.

In October of 1945, 100,000 tulip bulbs arrived in Ottawa, a gift of thanks from the Netherlands for sheltering the royal family and an expression of gratitude to the Canadians who had liberated the country.

The bulb fields had been through a war and the industry was in rough shape. The people sending those bulbs had been eating them a few months earlier, but the Dutch sent the bulbs anyway.

The royal family returned home and the next year Princess Juliana sent more bulbs to Ottawa. She made a promise that 10,000 bulbs would come to Ottawa every year. In 1948 she became queen and she kept her promise. Her family kept it after her and the Dutch bulb growers joined in and today the shipment is 20,000 bulbs every October for a debt that, as far as the Dutch are concerned, can never be paid.

More than 7,000 Canadians are buried in Dutch soil. After the war Dutch families adopted their graves, with one family tending the grave of one soldier. When the parents get old the children and grandchildren take over. Some of those soldiers are from Saskatchewan. Every Christmas Eve, since 1991, around 300 children eight to 12 years of age walk into a cemetery after dark and place a candle on each Canadian grave. The candles are the kind that keep burning through wind and rain. Christmas Eve is the one night when children are waiting in anticipation to open their gifts. Yet these Dutch children spend the evening out in the cold in a cemetery lighting candles at the graves of soldiers they never knew.

The Dutch people’s annual gesture of gratitude has produced beautiful blooms in Ottawa for over 80 years, and has kept history alive for all Canadians to see.

We live in a culture where it is so easy to lash out a negative response to a message online or a text. Offering complaints is so simple; even a toddler can do it and follow through with a temper tantrum.

But offering an expression or gesture of gratitude takes time and thoughtfulness. And just like the tulip bulbs that are planted in Canadian soil each and every year, they eventually produce something beautiful.

Joan Janzen