Readers Digest calls Tulip Time, here in Holland, Mich., the nation's top small-town festival. It's a week-long celebration of the region's Dutch heritage, not a Cinco de Mayo reference in sight.
Some 1,400 Klompen dancers, mostly high school girls, spend weeks learning the routines for the European-style folk dances. They pull on heavy socks and home-made costumes (patterned after traditional Dutch garb), slip into their clogs and stomp their way through some 50 performances. Parades, too: the governor leads one of them, wielding a broom to sweep the streets clean.
As for the tulips themselves, well, they line the streets of Holland in well-kept beds, and there's a 40-acre field on the outskirts of town. By comparison, the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival, which closed at the end of April, offered visitors over 300 acres of blooms, but no dancing.
