Notes on New 2026 Year

It’s been snowing in Amsterdam for the fourth day now. The last time we had proper snow here was about 5 years ago, but it only lasted a couple of days. It started snowing on January 1st, as if Dutch weather made itself a New Year’s resolution to turn over a new leaf and start fresh. Well, so far so good!

Everyone is building snowmen, children and adults are rolling around in snowdrifts, drawing angel wings with their hands, and at Museumplein, particularly creative minds repurposed part of the Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art building into a snow slide, sliding down on whatever they could find. In just 10 minutes of observation, I personally witnessed: a plastic bag, full snowboarder gear, and an Albert Heijn supermarket basket.

It seems that overall, the Netherlands isn’t handling the snow very confidently: many flights from Schiphol were cancelled or delayed, the same happened with intercity trains, children were allowed to skip school, and my dance classes were cancelled. It’s interesting that when snow is so rare, it becomes an emergency situation. A national weather emergency was declared across the country.

Parents, exhausted after the New Year holidays and hoping for school to resume, were probably a bit puzzled.

In Belarus, snow typically stays on the ground for two to three months a year — you get used to it, and everyone adapts. Roads are treated with sand and salt from day one, snow plows roll out onto almost every street in Minsk, and janitors work in the winter darkness with shovels twice as large.

On a sadder note, we woke up on New Year’s Day without the Vondelkerk church. Well, the church building is still standing, but around 1 AM on January 1st, it caught fire, and its main spire, along with the entire interior of the church, burned down. We live a kilometer away from the church and didn’t hear a thing—we only learned about it in the morning.

In the Netherlands, people absolutely love setting off fireworks for New Year’s. And not just for fun—it’s more akin to warfare. The streets literally turn into minefields. Everything explodes and re-explodes everywhere, and there are also official city fireworks displays that have been organized in recent years to reduce people’s attempts to stage their own shows.

In 2025, the Senate passed a law that effectively bans fireworks in the Netherlands starting in 2026. Fireworks store owners were forced to aggressively sell off their inventory, and people set off fireworks with double the intensity.

It seems this approach to dealing with fireworks won’t solve the problem, because people can buy them in neighboring Belgium and Germany, for example, and bring them into the Netherlands—which is exactly what they do.

P.S. All images were generated in ChatGPT, any resemblance to real people is coincidental :)