What is culture? That’s a question I have been pondering a lot lately.

You see, I am writing this article from the Netherlands, where I am currently on holiday. This is my third trip to the country in five years. There are many things about Holland that keep me coming back. The Dutch have no shortage of quaint museums, lively cities, and fun people, but by far one of the biggest motivations behind my repeated visits has been the simple joy of immersing myself in a foreign culture for a few weeks.

Holland is a western European country and as such is about as culturally similar to Canada as any non-British part of Europe gets. The Dutch drink Coke, go to McDonalds, watch War of the Worlds, listen to rap music, and so on. Yet despite a few superficial similarities, it does not take long to realize that the unique flavour of Dutch culture colours even these quintessentially North American experiences.

For example, while rap music is popular here, the most popular artists continue to be Dutch rappers, who bust mad rhymes in the native Dutch tongue. Right now, one of the most popular songs on the Dutch charts is “Watskeburt,” an insane-sounding rap song by the group De Jeugd van Tegenwoordi, or, roughly translated, "The Kids of Today." The music video features the main singer dancing around the streets of Amsterdam in a jumpsuit emblazoned with the colours of the Dutch flag. The whole phenomenon can be a bit surreal at times.

Weirdness aside, the point is, everywhere you go in Holland things are different, though often in subtle ways. Along with many of their own festivals and events, the Dutch celebrate birthdays, funerals, weddings, and even Christmas differently than us, with their own uniquely Dutch customs sprinkled throughout. In social situations the Dutch have often jarringly different standards of what constitutes “rude” behaviour. For example, while it is considered the height of rudeness to ask what someone’s job is, casually making an observation about someone’s physical appearance, such as “I see you are gaining weight,” or, “You seem to be loosing your hair,” is considered perfectly a-okay.

To me, it is all these things and more that collectively form a nation’s culture. All these little differences add up to make a country that is as vibrant and interesting as it is unique and independent. The more I experience it all, the more I start thinking how our own culture back home adds up in comparison.

In Canada, our government spends a great deal of tax money every year in its never-ending quest to promote “Canadian culture.” But what exactly constitutes our nation’s culture? Unlike the Dutch, Canadian culture is not a subtle or quaint thing. It is instead a state-sanctioned, bloated, multi-billion dollar industry driven mostly by the agenda of the country’s political bigwigs.

Canada Day, a holiday that should represent the height of Canadian culture, has instead become a national joke as the festivities become increasingly hijacked by government interests and their heavy-handed promotion of the “official” view of Canadian patriotism. In the big cities across the country, Canada Day celebrations now often consist of little more than politicians giving speeches. In the background, booths from the Ministry of Heritage hand out flags and posters stamped with the Government of Canada logo. Instead of celebrating items of traditional culture such as food, music, and history, we are increasingly told that Canada Day is a time to celebrate so-called “Canadian values” of multiculturalism, socialized healthcare, and bilingualism. It is now, as some pundits have already dubbed it, more akin to “Liberal Party Awareness Day” than a truly spontaneous national celebration.

By comparison, a few weeks ago I was lucky enough to cross the border and attend Belgium’s Independence Day festivities. Now that was a celebration of national culture. Downtown Brussels was packed with street vendors selling traditional Belgian cuisine, people in traditional Belgium costumes, traditional Belgian musical performances, proud displays of Belgian flags, colours, and symbols, and much more

The thing that struck me most of all was how natural all this was to the Belgians. Unlike the Canadians on Canada Day, Belgium’s holiday was not being celebrated out of a sense of routine obligation, nor were the festivities organized by a heavy-handed government eager to steer the proceedings for its own political interest. Instead, Belgian Independence Day was truly, well, Belgian. Everyone in Belgium knows what their culture is, and thus how to celebrate it. The same cannot be said of Canada.

The tragedy in all of this is that Canada does in fact have a culture. Ask any European traveller to our country and they’ll likely say they find our customs, media, food, and philosophies as interesting and unique as I find the cultural practices of Holland and Belgium. As my trip progresses, I still experience a form of mild culture-shock whenever I struggle to explain a certain beloved tradition from my society, like root beer floats or the Tooth Fairy, to citizens of a foreign culture that have never heard of things I take for granted as ordinary and mundane. Obviously, a cultural divide exists, or I could not experience such feelings in the first place.

This reality gets lost in the Canadian obsession over the “bigger” question, namely, “Does Canada have a unique culture?” Are we a culturally distinct nation on the world’s stage, with our own unique characteristics, or are we simply culturally inseparable from the homogenous United States? Canada’s blind obsession with anti- Americanism, especially on the part of this nation’s elites, seems to indicate the latter. We mock what we are not, rather than celebrate what we are, out of national insecurity and a shared unwillingness to accept our shared identity with citizens of the US.

That being said, the belief in a blob-like “American” culture that sweeps across the entire continent is equally invalid. Canada and the United States are alike in a broad sense, but Seattle is more like Vancouver than Austin, and likewise Austin is more like Atlanta than Seattle. Powerful regional identities exist across this great continent, making the attempt to create coherent and comprehensive definitions of a “Canadian” or “American” identity a rather fruitless pursuit. So, while both the US and Canada do share a common North American culture, we are simultaneously divided by a myriad of provincial, state, and even municipal cultures that are inevitable in a continent as massive as ours. Cohesive national identities may be possible in small European nation-states like Belgium, but that’s simply not the reality in our part of the globe.

Overall, when we obsess about culture in our country, it is important not to loose track of the bigger picture. The culture of our society is all around us, from the candied apples and corndogs we eat at the carnival, to the Halloween costumes we wear in October. It is the limited shopping hours on Sunday and the diplomas we get on graduation day. Culture is as much defined by the mundane routines of daily life as it is by the flags and slogans of a political state.

Much of our culture may not be identifiably “Canadian,” and it may not be particularly unique, but it is ours none the less, and I, for one, will be returning home with a renewed appreciation for it.