Flappie

Flappie is the name of a Dutch song written in 1978 by cabaret artist Youp van 't Hek . The melody comes from Jan Kokken. The initially rather unsuccessful piece was originally not a Christmas carol . It is now one of the most famous Christmas carols in the Netherlands. A certain black humor is extraordinary, which is otherwise rather untypical for songs of this genre.

The song

The song describes the fictional memories of a little boy on Christmas Day 1961. Since the text is written from the first person perspective , the narrator of the song is addressed as "Youp" and van 't Hek was also a little boy in 1961, the story seems like van 't Hek is telling from his childhood. It starts with Youp's rabbit "Flappie" being empty in the morning. His mother tells him that he is not allowed to go into the bike shed where his father works. But if he went to play well, he would get a candy.

In the following chorus , Youp remembers that the evening before, as every evening, he carefully locked the rabbit hutch. That evening, on Christmas Eve , he even went back again and stood in front of the stable for a long time as if he had had a premonition.

The second stanza describes the search for flappie. Youp and his family - including their father - are looking for Flappie everywhere - except in the bike shed, because he “couldn't be there”, as Youp quotes his father. After the repetition of the chorus, the family's Christmas dinner is described in the third verse, during which Youp can only think of flappie and can't get a bite. Then the main course appears and the father calls out happily: “Look, Youp, there is Flappie!” When Youp sees the cut rabbit lying on the plate, he thinks his father is terrible for the first time.

Now the melody of the chorus follows again, but with a different text that represents Youp's reaction: He runs upstairs angrily, curses, curses and stands for a long time in front of the window, looking at the empty stable.

The fourth stanza is shortened to four lines and adopted the text of the first verse again, but time and people have changed: This time, the second described Christmas Day, and the bed of Youps father yet. Youp explains to his mother that if she went to play well, she was not allowed to go to the bike shed and would get a candy. This ends the song without repeating the chorus. Everything else is left to the imagination of the listener.

Story of the song

Van 't Hek's sister's student cabaret group wanted to take part in a cabaret competition in 1978 and asked van' t Hek to write a song for it. With the explanation A song can be about anything, for example he wrote the song about a dead Christmas rabbit - according to his own statement, within ten minutes. After the song was well received at the competition, he introduced it to his own cabaret group Cabaret NAR . Their pianist, Jan Kokken, then wrote the melody known today. In the same year the song appeared on the LP Romantiek met mayonaise by Youp van 't Hek and Cabaret NAR. In 1981, Flappie was released on a Cabaret NAR single, on the B-side of which was the song Jonge Lotgenoten (Young Fateful Comrades ). In 1985 Flappie appeared on CD for the first time, again under the name van 't Heks.

A placement in the charts could not be achieved at that time. It was not until the turn of the year 2010/2011 that Flappie came to 59th place in the Dutch single Top 100 for the first time . This was repeated at the turn of the year 2011/2012 and 2012/2013. Flappie has been in the Top 2000, an annual list of listeners on the Dutch radio station NPO Radio 2 , since 2003. The highest ranking was 242 in 2004. In 2013, Flappie was voted the most popular Christmas carol by listeners to the Dutch radio station Q-Music .

Entrance into the popular culture of the Dutch-speaking area

The name Flappie is a relatively common rabbit name in the Netherlands and is derived from flaporen ( floppy ears). Thanks to the song and its spread, flappie has become a slang term for rabbits in Dutch.

Due to the popularity of the song, Flappie's story has been picked up in the Dutch media many times. In December 2006, for example, the newspaper De Telegraaf reported under the title Flappies vrezen Kerstdagen (Flappies fear Christmas days) that many animal shelters no longer sell rabbits in the weeks leading up to Christmas in order to prevent these rabbits from doing something like Flappie.

The social development that rabbits are now viewed more as pets than as farm animals and that their slaughter is considered unacceptable is closely linked to the fate of Flappies in the Dutch-speaking world. The media also refer to this phenomenon as "flappie syndrome" (flappie syndroom or flappie syndroom), and a master's thesis on the subject published in 2012 was entitled Flappie met pruimen ( flappie with plums).

The flappie motif is also used in commercials at Christmas time. In a 2010 commercial for the Dutch hardware store chain Praxis , a boy is shown securing a rabbit hutch with boards, nails, screws and chains. When the boy leaves at the end, you can see that the stable is labeled with Flappie .

In a commercial for mail order company bol.com , which was broadcast in slightly different versions in 2014 in the Netherlands and in Dutch-speaking Belgium , a rabbit named Flappie can be seen watching his family's Christmas preparations with anxious eyes. This fear is fueled, among other things, by the fact that knives are being sharpened in the kitchen and the Belgian version also shows a cookbook with a rabbit recipe. On Christmas Eve, the rabbit is taken out of the rabbit hutch by the father, whereupon it closes its eyes. After opening the eyes, the fear turns out to be unjustified - the rabbit is not slaughtered, but is given a huge new stable, which is labeled Villa Flappie . At the Gouden Loeki , the Dutch competition for the best commercial , it came second.