Labour Day's True Meaning

During my university days, a beer company launched an advertising campaign that included a petition calling for a public holiday in June. Their reasoning was if May, July, August, and September had public holidays, June should too. 

The petition collected thousands of signatures, but hit a snag when no one figured out what occasion the public holiday should celebrate – other than a brewery's desire to sell more beer.

They could have called it June Day and no one would've minded.

May's holiday is Queen Victoria' birthday, although it's not celebrated on her birthday (May 24). Instead it move arounds to fall on the last Monday of May, so people have a long weekend in the spring to open the cottage, drink beer by the case – or two-four, as they're called in Canada – play with fireworks, and visit hospitals to reattach blown-off fingers

July 1 is Canada Day, and is always on July 1. It's the only summer holiday they don't shift around to make a long weekend. People get grumpy about that.

The first Monday of August is a public holiday because it's Civic Day, which I'm not even going to pretend means anything.

The first Monday of September is for Labour Day. On paper it has something to do with organized labour and celebrating the 8-hour work day. In practice, it marks the end of the summer, when people close the cottage, quit drinking beer by the two-four, put away the fireworks, and make up a less embarrassing story to tell people about their new prosthetic fingers.

When you start moving public holidays to create long weekends, people tend to forget what the holiday is about. Labour Day is a great example.

Canada once celebrated Labour Day on May 1st, along with the rest of the world. This day honoured the gains of the organized labour movement, especially the 8-hour work day. The unions would march in the streets, call for better working conditions, and then spend the day with their families. 

Of course, workers in the streets attract considerable police attention, and nothing calms large crowds quite like a massive police presence. Riots were common. In 1886, someone threw a bomb at police during a Labour Day march in Chicago. Police responded by firing indiscriminately into the crowd. 

Labour Day became a day of remembrance for that massacre, which invited larger rallies and more clashes with the police. The Canadian government switched its Labour Day to the first Monday of September, hoping to avoid working class commotion on May 1st. It worked.

Today, the first of May is just another work day in Canada, while September's Labour Day is another day to sell barbeque accessories and beer. 

In Germany and Hungary, there are still marches on May 1st. The anarchists also join the fun, so there is occasional rioting. The far right groups organize demonstrations on the same day against immigration and, so brawls tend to erupt between the two extremes.

I've never seen a march in Canada on Labour Day. And many people I know work more than 8 hours a day. Some often work weekends. Most struggle balancing work with life. 

Beer companies can ask for all the public holidays they want in June, February, or whenever, but it doesn't make a difference if we’ve forgotten how hard it was to get the time off we deserve.

How to Make Easter Epic

Hiking down the hills.

If you're not careful, Easter can become April's blah long weekend.

For some lucky folks, we see the family and eat a decent meal. In Canada, there’s the Friday off, and a Monday too if you work a cushy government job. 

For many, it doesn’t always feel like a big deal. The weather in my corner of Canada can still be downright Arctic-esque. A lot of people just aren't religious. And still others don't know how to make the most of a long weekend.

The only folks who might appreciate it are the young ones, who crave the Easter chocolate, and the university students with late April exams who crave the studying… or partying.

Maybe there’s the lesson to be learned here: Gather the family for a good meal. Hide eggs all over the place for the kids (and remember where they are, unless you want to find a melted chocolate egg between the couch cushions in July). Hit a patio on Good Friday and pour one out for JC. 

After all, it’s up to you to make Easter epic.

In Europe, we get both the Friday and the Monday off, so if you don't get off the couch on Friday, you can rise and redeem yourself on Monday. It's also easier to catch a flight to wherever. 

And people take advantage of these two precious extra days. They go home. They go somewhere warm. They hike. They get day drunk. They make Easter epic.

This year, we escaped to Hungary – the land of smoked ham and boiled eggs this time of year. Along with many fine family dinners and many deep conversations with toddlers in my broken Hungarian, we also made off to the hills for a 25km hike (my calves are still recovering from this glorious ordeal).

The route, planned by Kata’s dad, took us up and through the hills in the north of the country where we wandered through Hollókő. This small town is like walking into a time machine. It’s been preserved as it was hundreds of years ago with its traditional wooden houses and its residents decked out in their traditional costumes.

There’s an Easter tradition where the boys say a poem and splash the girls with cheap perfume or a bit of water. Because boys are involved, this tradition easily goes off the rails and men spray entire crowds with buckets of water, or soak one girl in particular. We arrived just in time for a man on stilts in traditional costume to do the former.

We walked through the crowds of tourists, up a hill to the castle that overlooks the valley, and back into the forest and hills.

By the end of such a long hike, your feet are tired, your calves feel like they're on fire, and your pace has slowed enough that you can drink in the sights, sounds, and smells of the forest. It's a natural high on nature.

The next day, with my calves still burning from the Hollókő Hike, we ventured down from the hills into the Great Plain of Hungary – by car, not by foot – to visit more family. 

The day after that, we rode on Budapest for a haircut, sausage-shopping, and lunch and still crammed in a visit to Lake Velence to see Kata's brother's new house before catching our flight back to Dusseldorf.

Easters doesn't need chocolate eggs or spring weather or Jesus to be great. Take a note from the kids, the university students, and the Europeans: make your Easter epic.

The folklore girls look on as the man with the stilts and bucket of water recites his poem to them.

The leader of the hike and the castle... and a sword fight in the background.

The traditional time machine to olden times Hungary.

Nice German Places You Wouldn’t Want to Visit 1000 Years Ago

Some day someone will perfect time travel, opening an extreme time travel tourism industry for the German medieval ages. War, famine, plagues, massacres, bad food, awful hygiene, and religious fanaticism will appear on our social media feeds. If the past gets 3G coverage.

While we wait for time travel scientists to get it together and discover how to bend time and space so we can take selfies with Charlemagne, we must settle on seeing what’s left of medieval Germany right here.

North Rhine-Westphalia, the state I live in, is a fine place to discover German’s violent and, with the benefit of hindsight, exciting medieval roots. 

Münster I

This calm city, named for that Addams-esque TV family, is an easy-going university town today with street-side cafes and bike lanes leading every which way along its tree-lined avenues.

During the Reformation, it was a little less academic and a lot more anarchic. Anabaptists revolted against the Catholic-Protestant government and took control of the city. They were early Amish, Quakers, and Mennonites – although these guys were more violent and dogmatic than their kinder, friendlier, barn-building ancestors.

They renamed the town New Jerusalem and established a proto-communist state, abolishing private property and rebaptising its people.

This angered both the Catholics and the Protestants, so in a rare show of cooperation, they gathered an army and laid siege to the town.

Nerves frayed in the city. People were going hungry. There was talk of surrender. After the Anabaptist leader was killed in battle, his successor made polygamy legal and rushed to marry Münster’s prettiest women before telling the townspeople.

The town fell and was promptly looted and pillaged. The generals tortured and executed the leaders, and, deciding that wasn’t bloody enough, stuffed the bodies into cages hanging from a church tower. The cages are still there. Münster is macabre too, man.

Look a little closer...

There are the Anabaptist death cages.

Kaiserspfalz of Kaiserswerth

Sitting upon a throne, waited upon by servants, receiving supplicants, passing down judgements and wisdom, this was the stuff of kings, not the Holy Roman Emperor.

The Holy Roman Empire, was, to paraphrase a smarter person, neither holy nor roman nor an empire. It was a collection of hundreds of small states run by princes, counts, bishops, kings, and dukes who elected an emperor with just enough power not to annoy any of the princes, counts, bishops, kings, or dukes.

Think of it as a feudal European Union. Its borders included modern day Germany, the Czech Republic, Austria, Northern Italy, and parts of Poland, France, Belgium and Holland.

Emperors mostly ruled from horseback. They traveled all over the realm, dealing with complaints, but mostly putting down rebellions. 

To make things easier, the emperor and his imperial posse stayed in a network of castles, called Kaiserspflazes. It was safer, and he could count on good food and clean bedsheets, and he knew where the secret passages were. 

The castle at Kaiserswerth used to be on an island in the Rhine, so it was an important defensive fortification and an imperial crash pad.

What's left of the imperial crash pad at Kaiserswerth.

Münster II

Most medieval towns’ story would end after a bloody suppression of a revolt, but Münster would bounce back because the whole Catholic-Protestant mess was still unresolved. 

The Catholics and Protestants within the Holy Roman Empire made peace. If your prince was of a certain religion you had to convert or leave, this applied to Catholics, Calvinists and Anabaptists – but not Lutherans, who could stay and still be Lutheran.

The new Catholic Holy Roman Emperor tried to make everyone in the empire Catholic, which angered the Protestants. The Protestants of Bohemia (part of today’s Czech Republic) stormed Prague Castle, and threw the Catholic leaders out a window – who survived, due to divine intervention, or the short fall, depending on who you asked. 

This started a war. The emperor fought the Bohemians with the help of the Catholic Bavarians. It was a stalemate until the Saxons joined the Catholics, who started winning the war. 

To even things out for the Protestants, Sweden joined the war against the Catholics.

The Swedes and all the Protestant Germans were now winning, so Catholic Spanish joined the war to bail out the emperor (who was related to the king of Spain) and also fight the Dutch, who they've been fighting before this war.

Now the Catholics were winning, but Catholic France was not comfortable with being surrounded by two rivals (Holy Roman Empire and Spain), even though they were all Catholic. So they joined the Protestant side.

This went on for 30 years, which is what the war was called, because originality was killed in the war along with millions of people. They ran out of energy and signed a few treaties, known as the Peace of Westphalia, ending the 30 Years War and, the equally original 80 Years War.

This treaty changed how states interact with each other. They had to respect other states’ sovereignty, especially over territory, politics, and religion. It also recognized Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists were all given legal rights – not Anabaptists, sadly they would be considered heretics, which is really unfair since most of them were pacifists.

This was also the first major international political conference, which changed how states make and keep peace. We wouldn’t have the UN or EU without the Peace of Westphalia, which was signed in Münster.

Munster's city hall, where they signed my favourite
peace treaty: The Peace of Westphalia

Walkin' in Aachen

This city is tucked in a far corner of Germany, close to France and Belgium. It isn’t big, maybe 200,000 or so people, but back in the day when kings were kings with beards and swords, it was Charlemagne’s capital city. He lived here when he wasn’t putting down rebellions, which was mostly what he did.

There isn’t a lot left from those days. Years of kings and other important people who try to outdo the previous generation have torn down and rebuilt the city until it was decimated in the war.

One of the old survivors is the Palatine Chapel. It isn’t the biggest church around – Cologne’s Dom and all those fancy French gothic cathedral are much bigger – but damn is it lovely in its simplicity.

It’s based on a Byzantine design – because it was built in the 800s – so it’s circular, not the usual rectangular or cross shape, and its interior covered with mosaics. It has a vaulted dome, a short tower, and a bell tower. 

It’s ancient. It’s understated. It’s one of the nicest churches I’ve visited in Europe (when you travel in Europe, you poke your head into a lot of old churches).

The Palatine Chapel of Aachen.

The vaulted, mosaic-ed dome inside the Palatine Chapel.

That gold box is Charlemagne's tomb.