What it's like when you constantly have to justify why carnival is fun though

I celebrate carnival. Not a little, but from confetti in the hair to a recovery period afterwards. So there are people who don't understand anything about this and let me know. Not that I ask them to, I don't talk much about my carnivalesque excesses, but they still treat you to an opinion. Free and unsolicited, you never really want that duo anyway.

Whether I will then knock myself over for five days booze (because suddenly it is no longer drinking) and whether I already know this and that new carnival hit (no idea). If I then explain to them that I go out the three weekends before that and celebrate it with a lot of love, they will stare at you with a big question mark on their face. Think of it this way: you are the greatest Christmas lover on earth and your colleague says a hundred thousand times that she finds that strange. She also asks fifty times what you drink at dinner and what you wear. Then when you explain that (not answering is rude), she looks like you've gone completely cuckoo. Is not nice, dear all, is just not that nice when you love something very much.

You (meaning me) have options. Firstly, you can choose not to care what anyone else thinks. Is a fine one, but it still gnaws at you because you love it yourself, and it's in a person (in me, that is) to want to convince. Secondly, you can keep it shady so that the other person is ignorant. People don't like being ignorant. Third: you (me yes) can explain it once and for all. Maybe you feel it already, that's what I'm going to do.

For me, the charm is in the togetherness. Some people start pedalling at a King's Day with friends on the canal, I at carnival. The next one is making jumps at three days in a tent on the festival grounds. I go grinning from this celebration. My friends, his family, little kids, old berries; everyone gets their gear out of mothballs to hit the streets. Bergen op Zoom is different and that's why it stole my heart. You all make something with the same ingredients to put on, so you are equal. No one notices whether you normally wear a Gucci or a Wibraat, you hand-stitch curtains and mop up jackets. Basically, you suddenly turn to crafts. That we all get into beer is simply because a normal person cannot go weeks and days on liquor. You know, I know. You see friends from the past, dance a bit with the neighbour you would otherwise pass by. The music is self-made, in Bergen even 1 in 5 residents plays an instrument. No horns on watercraft, but music about the town itself and their party. You have acts and drama, so you get culture from childhood. It's one big party. Inside pubs, outside on the streets, in the theatres, in the squares. With young and with old or even slightly older. And does that time between Christmas and spring always last forever? We take a month off that, because we are out and about. So if someone doesn't get it, lots of plausible reasons to convince them.

If they don't want to hear it now, then it's a lost cause and they just don't know what they are missing. Also fine.