Autumn Holiday…

…Høstferie

It’s vacation time already for my kids at the International School but also for Norwegians children and I might have found the reason. Well it at least applies to the Norwegian schools and when I think about it it could as well apply to the part of France I come from, but instead of potatoes we were harvesting walnuts.

Autumn school holiday called 'old-fashioned'
Every year, just five or six weeks after the school year begins, Norwegian schools shut down again for a week of so-called høstferie (autumn holiday). It stems from the days when farming paid a much bigger role in Norwegian society, and children were needed to help harvest potatoes in the fields. It was even called potetferie. Now, however, it causes lots of problems for parents who have difficulty taking the week off work themselves. Many children end up getting placed in an extended version of the after-school child-minding program known as SFO (skole fritids ordning), which parents must pay for even though the program uses public school facilities when the schoolday ends as early as 1pm. On Tuesday, a top politician in Kristiansand went on national radio to propose that the autumn holiday week be scrapped. It's old-fashioned, impractical and not necessary for students to have holiday just over a month into the autumn term. School administrators immediately objected, arguing that the teachers are entitled to the holiday time and that the school districts don't have the budgets to keep the school open an extra week. Some companies, meanwhile, have come up with novel ways of coping with the autumn holiday, which took place last week in most of the country. Mobile telephone operator NetCom invites its employees to bring their children to work, where the personnel department hosts all sorts of activities to keep the kids busy. Around 80 children took part this year, many of them repeat participants. Newspaper Dagens Næringsliv reported that "Barnas Uke" ("Children's Week") is so popular that many parents say their children don't allow them to take the week off. The kids would rather accompany them to work.

Now I know why they eat potatoes every day!