Day: February 22, 2025

Another week, another Going Dutch. This week, they celebrate Christmas in the Spring for stupid reasons. Let’s just get into it. But first, on Animal Control this week, Frank and Shred catch a penguin and Victoria and Patel drive a dog to Canada.

I actually watch Animal Control as a way to detox after watching Going Dutch. I can believe that Joel McHale is weirdly intense, animal control is just a kind of cop I don’t have to feel conflicted about watching on TV. It’s not like it’s a particularly good show or anything, it’s fine most weeks, but it’s at least a show that exists in a world that makes sense to me. I like that it cares about animal welfare, it can be funny to watch people chase after CGI animals.

Anyway. Here’s well over 2000 words on this week’s Going Dutch.

Dutch Notes

• Denis Leary is woken up by an entire Christmas situation outside his bedroom window, having apparently not noticed it setting up in the night. There’s live animals involved. You slept through this?
• Carolers walk past his window, singing: “Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle door de nacht. Oh wat fijn het is te zijn,” and then something Leary talks over. This is nonsense. It just about scans but it’s a weirdly literal translation. We mostly don’t sing this song in Dutch, though there is a widely shared Dutch version easily available online.¹Which probably doesn’t clear legal, but still.
• Walking into work, Leary finds people blowing weird Swiss horns again, always with the horns, we don’t do horns, and Jan dressed like Sinterklaas, holding a big bag full of oranges. We never really associated oranges with Sinterklaas or Christmas where I’m from, more with Sint Maarten, but I know that’s a thing, a very regional thing, and that me being from Friesland paints my understanding of this country.
  • The oranges are a thing but they… should be mandarin oranges, they should be mandarijntjes,
• So it’s a weird combination of Sinterklaas and Christmas, on the Third Tuesday of Spring, got it.
• Jan explains why this is happening: “During Second World War, Stroopsdorf couldn’t celebrate Christmas because we were under enemy occupation. And after we got liberated, we decided to celebrate in spring instead. So now we celebrate Christmas twice a year. Twice Christmas.”
  • The Netherlands has no meaningful Christmas tradition before WW2. Sure, people probably celebrated it to some extent, but we had Sinterklaas, and life in pre-War Netherlands would not have had space for a second major gift-giving holiday only twenty days later. It’s only English and American influence AFTER WW2 that gets us to celebrate Christmas.
  • Sinterklaas as a celebration was not banned by the Nazis, the Nazis Nazified it, involving soldiers and the Jeugdstorm in things like the national intocht, the parade when Sinterklaas’ boat arrives in the country. The Nazis would’ve wanted you to celebrate Sinterklaas.
  • Americans often refer to Sinterklaas as “Dutch Christmas,” and though, sure, that’s an easy way to explain it through comparison, it’s not. It’s its own fucking thing. (Its own problematic thing.)
• When asked why he’s dressed “like a pope,” Jan explains he’s “Dutch Father Christmas, known as Sinterklaas.” Again, though, yes, they’re comparable, it’s its own thing. Jan, being a Dutch person, would either not refer to this as Christmas or be dressed as Santa Claus.
• Jan continues to explain that Sinterklaas distributes oranges and puts candy in children’s shoes, which Leary automatically extrapolates to “so you’re a fruit peddler, who’s got a foot fetish, is that the idea?”
  • One, your own Santa breaks into people’s houses and his reindeer discrimination is openly celebrated, throw no stones, American.
    • Jan adds “At least it’s not as idiotic as your Santa Claus, that grinning mascot for your country’s obesity and the whore to your corporations, yes, I said it, whore.” I agree on the corporate thing, though it’s not like we don’t use Sinterklaas in commercials, but come the fuck on, now we’re fatshaming Santa? Find better stones to throw.
  • Two, Americans have this sickening habit of automatically sexualising anything and everything they can associate with sex. You can’t post a picture or video that happens to include your feet any more without Americans and those melted by their brainrot cracking jokes about Onlyfans and Wikifeet. Your profoundly backwards prudishness is a disease, it’s destroying you, and it’s hurting the rest of us. Perish.
• Leary’s reaction to the explanation he asked for is to threaten to physically assault Jan with oranges. Great safe workplace you’ve got here. Captain Daughter explains to Jan that this happens because Leary hates Christmas. Sinterklaas is not Christmas.
• This is gonna be a problem with the entire episode, so I’m just gonna end it at this bullet point: The intermingling of Sinterklaas with Christmas iconography drives me fucking insane. These things mean things. I don’t mind a winter-themed sweater or two, but candy canes? Reindeer? A Christmas Carol? Tell me where exactly Dickens mentions the steamboat, motherfucker.
• Captain Daughter tells us Leary will try to cancel Christmas, so Jan says Leary “will take away Christmas, like the fuzzy green grump of legend.” I don’t think we really care about the Grinch outside of one or two movies. I saw Grinch merch at the Primark this year, not seen a single one of those sweaters out in the wild.
• Joe Morton is back, he loves Christmas, and will be portraying Santa at some point soon.
• Meanwhile, Denis Leary surprises Captain Daughter by… not actively hating Christmas, but wearing a cheap Santa hat and greeting her with a “ho ho ho.” Captain Daughter is confused, asking if there’s a gun pointing at him right now, but then Catherine Tate walks in — clearly he’s doing this because the local head of the Chamber of Commerce / owner of the local brothel / Leary’s girlfriend wants him to.
  • Once again, the Chamber of Commerce does not have that kind of position here, and though we are indeed more open to sex work than many other places, in reality, the Catherine Tate character would be considered the owner of something other local business owners would consider an unpleasant nuisance.
• There are now two locals, Jan and Catherine Tate²Neither are played by Dutch actors, of course., actively condoning this absolute buffoonery with their presence.
• Captain Daughter expresses typical American discomfort at the mention of her father’s sex life, which is followed by the following exchange between Leary and Tate: “She’s so repressed.” “I know. It’s her mom.” The fucking audacity.
• Real Dutch license plates in the parking garage.
• Tate’s accent work, a lot of weird S sounds, really bugging me this week.
• I’ve written over a thousand words and I’m only seven minutes in. Oy oy oy.
• Captain Daughter goes to Catherine Tate’s house, which you can tell is in the Netherlands because it looks like an Irish style of architecture with hastily planted tulips in the backyard.
• Missed opportunity for a Samson en Gert joke.
• “I rang the doorbell but you weren’t answering.” “So you decided to surprise me through the back door.” “Hm.” You are your father’s daughter.” Awful joke, truly dogshit joke, which I’m only typing here because, one, it’s not the back door, it’s the backyard, and two, god-fucking-damnit, it’s so normal here to just walk into someone’s house or backyard if you know them. I don’t like it, either, but this is not a weird thing for Captain Daughter to do, and it’s profoundly weird for Catherine Tate to be annoyed by it.
  • Tate doesn’t get on with Captain Daughter, which she reiterates repeatedly, because this show fully believes every Dutch person is either direct to the point of obscene rudeness or a flamboyant homosexual.
• Captain Daughter gets Tate a gift for Twice Christmas and tells her exactly what it is before she can open it. Is it a Dutch thing to thing gift spoilers are rude and weird? Because I think that’s rude and weird.
• Captain Daughter is trying to get to know Catherine Tate in that weird, overly-polite people-pleasing American way. This would land poorly on us, but we would try to be polite to you about it. We would think what Tate says to Captain Daughter, sure, but we’d also offer you coffee or tea and put out some cheese cubes.
• “We are making venison.” Deer meat signals to me mostly that a person is posher than this Catherine Tate character is, but okay. I think she’d say deer meat, though.
  • Please follow me on a journey.
    • Oh my god, the deer is still currently alive.
    • She’s asked Captain Daughter to kill it and handed her a knife.
    • Absolutely not a thing this Tate character would do.
    • We have butcher shops, the supermarket carries this stuff.
    • I think I have this meat knife. From IKEA, though.
    • Oh, good god, she stops Captain Daughter before she can.
    • She absolutely would have, because she’s an insane American people-pleaser.
    • This character would not do this prank, pranks are the opposite of the directness she’s supposed to practice, it’s utterly insincere, and I do actually hate pranks.
    • But I did, I did go on a journey here for a second.
• More nonsense Christmas song lyrics, this time for Deck the Halls: “Zie het huis met dennentakken / fa-la la-la la-la la-la.” Way too literal.
• Joe Morton makes a decent Santa.
• Hanging out on the base even though in a previous episode he was accused of being a spy is “little Dutch boy” Geert, who has asked Santa for “a body pillow for humping,” in Santa’s words. I’ve met enough little dudes who, yeah, they would ask for that. Fair enough. Don’t like Joe Morton telling him “if you were dog they’d have neutered you for less.” It’s already weird enough that there’s a randy 12-year old running around on this base, don’t tell him you’d have him neutered.
• Captain Daughter crashes Tate’s Twice Christmas party with no gift, which she brings up because she’s desperate to prove she’s not a people-pleaser, but then still hands her a gift. She then just walks in.
  • Not a Dutch thing, more a me thing, but if I’d communicated my distaste for a person’s presence in my life as thoroughly as Tate had done to Captain Daughter, and they refused to take no for an answer, I would not allow her entry into my house and would remove her if she took it anyway, which nobody would think was unreasonable.
  • Everyone at Tate’s party looks Irish.
• Dana was invited to the party, and we hear some Dutch from her conversation, “dat is super leuk,” pronounced as poorly as may be possible, to the extent that it’s the only subtitled Dutch in the episode — the subtitlers have gone for “That’s super look,” because they thought she was speaking English. Her next line, “Oh, hoe gaat het!” is left unsubtitled.
• Dinner at Tate’s house is gourmetten, which she pronounces like she has several entire bricks in her mouth. Y’all know about gourmetten? Little pieces of meat on either a plate or little pans? This is something they get right on paper, this is a thing we do. Like, we did this in December, like we do most years.
  • The plate she puts down is insane, though, it’s huge slabs of meat all in a pile. Just get twenty little packages from the Albert Heijn, what the fuck is this.
• Captain Daughter: “Are we guests at this dinner or are we working it?” Surely there are contexts Americans know about where you cook the food at the table. Maybe Captain Daughter has never been to Korean barbecue.
• Captain Daughter: “The whole spread is… Bad. Yuck.” Actively hateful. Worse than her dad. You force your way into somebody’s home and start hating on their culture’s holiday dinner tradition? It’s not even that fucking weird?? Captain Daughter, you are from the home of the turducken.
• One of the party guests is called Beatrix, a name she shares with former Queen Beatrix. I’m sure it happens, but I feel like we don’t really name our kids after the royal family, whose names are far too posh for most people. Beatrix apparently “makes chairs that are uncomfortable for people to sit in,” because “human comfort is not the reason for an object to exist.” I might’ve gone to art school with Beatrix, I think I might-a sat in one of her chairs once. Not really a mindset the Dutch have, though.
• “When I place my butt on one of Beatrix’s chairs,” says another mysteriously-accented guest, “the beating life of its creator’s enters me.” Tate’s guests are just art weirdoes, maybe. Now she’s in the art scene, too? Why is this one character instead of seven?
• Here’s the actual gourmet setup, and, okay, fine, I would accept this if it were in, like, a commercial.
• Captain Daughter naturally slams her hands into the burning hot pan-less gourmetstel, which is a different model than the ones in the middle of the table, weirdly positioned on the corner of the table where only Tate would really be able to reach it, and clearly just there for Captain Daughter to hurt herself with. This is just hacky.
• Danny Pudi’s B-plot is about using all the resources of the American army to spy on his ex-wife’s new boyfriend, which is just pathetic and sucks, but I don’t gotta cover it, so.
• Miserable.
• You know, they never bring up Zwarte Piet.

• 1
  Which probably doesn’t clear legal, but still.
• 2
  Neither are played by Dutch actors, of course.