In One Office, Your Birthday Costs You Money. In the Other, It's a Public Holiday for Everyone Else.

🇳🇱 Netherlands · 🇮🇳 India

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

In a Dutch office, your birthday is not a day you receive gifts — it is a day you are expected to bring cake for the entire team, a custom called trakteren, and failing to do so is quietly noted as stingy. In an Indian office, Diwali, Holi, and half a dozen other festivals throughout the year are treated as company-wide bonding events, with sweets, decorations, and shared celebration organised largely by the employer, not the individual whose day it happens to be. One culture makes social ritual a personal obligation. The other makes it a collective one. Get the direction backwards and you'll either show up empty-handed to your own party or wonder why nobody told you it was your turn to host.

Do's & Don'ts

🇳🇱 Netherlands

🇮🇳 India

Dutch office rituals run on an economy of small, individually-owed obligations layered onto an otherwise efficient, low-ceremony day. The lunch break itself is a case study in Dutch practicality: dutchreview.com and multiple expat guides describe offices emptying almost exactly at noon and refilling half an hour later, with the vast majority of employees eating a modest homemade boterham — bread with a thin, unfussy topping — either at their desk or in a shared canteen. The social judgment embedded in that habit is subtle but real: bringing a store-bought sandwich can register, however mildly, as a small failure of self-sufficiency. Birthdays invert the usual gift-giving logic entirely — the celebrant is expected to bring treats for colleagues, a tradition called trakteren that starts in primary school and persists straight into adult office life, and skipping it is noticed even in a culture that otherwise prizes not making a fuss.

Indian office social rituals run in the opposite direction: outward-facing, collectively organised, and built around India's dense calendar of festivals. SHRM India and multiple workplace-culture outlets describe Diwali, Holi, Eid, and other celebrations as genuine, employer-supported team-bonding events — decorations, shared sweets, and cultural activities that are frequently organised and funded by the company rather than falling to any one employee. The function is explicitly inclusive: colleagues from different religious and regional backgrounds are typically invited into each other's celebrations, and participation is treated as a way to build cross-cultural trust rather than a display of personal identity. Food sits at the center of daily bonding too — shared meals and communal eating are described repeatedly as where real workplace relationships get built, often more effectively than in formal meetings.

The Reckoning is about who bears the social cost of celebration. In the Netherlands, ritual is decentralised down to the individual — you fund and host your own moments of recognition, which keeps the culture efficient but places a small, recurring burden on each person as their turn comes up. In India, ritual is centralised up to the organisation — the company absorbs the cost and effort of celebration, which removes individual burden but means opting out, even quietly, is more socially visible than it would be in a culture where nobody's watching whose turn it is. A Dutch employee moving to an Indian office may find the abundance of company-funded festivity slightly overwhelming, having never had to reciprocate anything before. An Indian employee moving to a Dutch office may be startled to learn that their own birthday is, culturally, an obligation rather than a gift.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Quora — An Indian software consultant working in Rotterdam described being baffled on her first work birthday when colleagues asked what she'd be bringing in — she'd assumed, reasonably, that turning 30 abroad might at least come with a card.

Internations Amsterdam — A Filipino expat noted that after two years in a Dutch office, she'd come to genuinely enjoy trakteren, but admitted the first year felt like an unspoken tax she hadn't budgeted for, both financially and socially.

r/india — A commenter working at a multinational in Bangalore described how Diwali at the office had become one of the few times all departments actually mingled, with senior leadership handing out sweets personally — a level of cross-hierarchy informality that vanished the rest of the year.

Stuff Dutch People Like (community-documented custom) — Long-running documentation of the trakteren tradition notes that even Dutch people sometimes find the obligatory self-hosted celebration slightly absurd, but the custom persists because opting out is read as more awkward than participating.

Quora — A German expat working in Mumbai wrote that the sheer frequency of festival-driven office celebrations took real adjustment — he'd budgeted socially for one or two major events a year and found himself recalibrating for what felt like a new occasion nearly every month.

Conclusion

The practical question for anyone relocating is simple: are you comfortable footing the bill, literally, for your own recognition, or would you rather the company handle celebration on your behalf, even if that means less control over which traditions get centered. Neither answer is wrong, but showing up unprepared for either norm reads worse than it should — arriving in Amsterdam without a cake plan, or arriving in Mumbai expecting festivals to be someone else's problem.

If you want my honest read: the Dutch system is fairer in the aggregate, since everyone eventually pays their own way, but the Indian system builds more collective warmth per calendar year. Pick based on which kind of belonging you'd rather earn — the kind you buy yourself a slice of, or the kind that's handed to you, sweets and all.