Wooden shoes

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Who is wearing wooden shoes?
Why are they wearing wooden shoes?
How are wooden shoes made?
The decoration
The history of the wooden shoe
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Who is wearing wooden shoes?

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Everybody over the whole world thinks that all the people in Holland wear wooden shoes.
But that's not right!
Only a "few" people in Holland wear wooden shoes, about 5000, maybe more, maybe less, so only a small part of the population
And almost all the people wearing wooden shoes are farmers or people in a nursery. That means that people who need wooden shoes for their jobs, have them as industrial clothing.

Why are they wearing wooden shoes?

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Farmers, market-gardeners and so on are most of the time wearing wooden shoes. That is because it's very handy to wear them when you walk on dirty ground. It's also to protect yourself. You can wear boots of rubber, so you won't get dirty feet, socks and trousers (at the underside of course).
But there are some disadvantages when you wear boots instead of wooden shoes!
If you are a gardener you probablly won't need wooden shoes, but if you are a farmer and you have some dangerous, sharp objects on your farmyard, and it would be everything except nice to have the weight of a cow on, a nail, a point of a pitchfork or something like that in your feet, therefore you can better wear wooden shoes, because:

• They protect you!
  You won't feel or you won't even notice when you are standing on the point of a nail, because the nail won't get into your wooden shoes. And if you do the same (standing on a nail) when you are wearing boots of rubber you'll scream and maybe even cry because it hurts terribly to stand on a sharp point.

How are wooden shoes made?

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Wooden shoes are made by hand, or by machines. Making wooden shoes by hand has almost completly disappeared. Only at some places in Holland you can watch people who make wooden shoes just as in the past, like the old artisans.
To make wooden shoes of a piece of wood you need to have professional knowledge. The artisan gets this professional knowledge out of experience, but you have to have some natural ability.
You would know that you need a lot of insight for the making of wooden shoes. The left shoe has to be exactely the same as the right one. Of course, you also need good instruments. The artisan maintains his tools really well, and his knifes and hatchets become even sharper while he is working. All the different tools have a special name (the name is even different from area to area). The tools are standing down here, but the text under it is Dutch, because it wasn't possible to translate it into English.

The making of a wooden shoe

There is a problem, not by the making of a wooden shoe, but by the explanation of the making of a wooden shoe in English.
We got the information on this page out of some books, but the books are written in Dutch, because we live in Holland. And in the chapter of the making of wooden shoes there are used a lot of difficult words to translate, they do not even stand in a dictionary ( because it is written in technical terms). In the Dutch part of this page there is lots of text of how people make wooden shoes, but here there isn't, sorry.
So we are not going to write down a lot, but we are going to explain the making of a wooden shoe by scaned pictures and a little explanation under them.

The decoration

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The finishing touch of the making of a wooden shoe is, of course, the decoration. Sometimes the decoration is only a painting sometimes also carved work.
As art, the carved work in wooden shoes and to paint on them has not disappeared yet. People who do this kind of work don't do it for a living, but because they like to do it, it's their hobby. The work of the loving amateur leads to an other "hobby", the "klompendanskunst" (a dance on wooden shoes), and to the wearing of costumes. It's true that people in some places in Holland still wear their costume and their belonging to wooden shoes daily is like a natural, spontaneous thing.
But a lot of costumes are already in a museum, no one still wears them. And the wooden shoe with decoration is going to be only in a museum to look at, too. The valuable wooden shoes decoration proces is going to belong to a disappearing folklore.

The history of the wooden shoe

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The wooden shoe, in it's shape like our days, was since the late Dark Ages worn at a lot of places in Europe. Here and there people still wear wooden shoes, the most in Holland. Especially because of the swampy ground of Holland, and also because there was a lot of good wood (willows and poplars) in Holland. The wooden shoe kept on being popular for a long time everywhere in Holland. Even when the watertight boots of rubber were designed, people kept the wooden shoe, because it was so easy to use. (Look at Why are they wearing wooden shoes?)
Of the 3 million wooden shoes which are made yearly, a big part of them are destined for tourist seats.
In lots of large souvenir shops the wooden shoe is a striking element. And at some places there is a teaching workshop were wooden shoes are made by a real, old-fashioned artisan, like there were thousands of earlier. Because decennia, even some ages, ago the wooden shoe user made his wooden shoe himself.
In general in the past you could see well from which part of the country a wooden shoe came because every area had its own marks. Every wooden shoe "talked" its own dialect. The history of the wooden shoe became, because of this a part, of the Dutch cultural history.

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Go to the page of the Texas klompendansers (a dance on wooden shoes)
Go to the page of a factory of wooden shoes