About

It started with a picnic

In the summer of 2022, three siblings — Martha, Ray, and Sarah Faust — organized a Nationalfeierdag picnic in Minneapolis at Minnehaha Regional Park. Luxembourg’s national holiday, June 23, felt like the right occasion for an experiment: was there a community here? Were there other Minnesotans connected to the Grand Duchy who had nowhere to take that feeling?

The answer arrived in the form of more people than anyone expected. The Fausts and their guests at that first picnic were happily surprised. A community wasn’t waiting to be built. It was already there, waiting to find itself.

The Twin Cities Luxembourg American Society was informally founded the following year. The name is straightforward on purpose. We’re here, we’re Luxembourgish, and we’re from Minnesota. That’s the whole thing.

Who we are

TCLAS is a membership organization for Minnesota Luxembourgers — dual citizens navigating the paperwork, heritage seekers tracing a line back to a commune in the Gutland or Oesling, expats who landed in Minneapolis and want to feel at home, and everyone still figuring out what exactly their connection to the modern Grand Duchy means.

We share what we know. We host events — the Béier fir Bierger happy hour series, the annual Nationalfeierdag Picnic, and gatherings in between. We maintain research resources for people tracing their ancestry. And we help our members understand what Luxembourg citizenship is, what it means, and what it makes possible.

What we’re not: a preservation society, a genealogy club, or a group that treats Luxembourg as something that happened in the past. Luxembourg is a living place with a living culture. Our members have a live relationship with it — some of them longer than others, some of them just beginning.

Our logo and colors

The symbols we use to represent TCLAS aren’t arbitrary. At the center is our logo, based on the Roude Léiw — the Red Lion, Luxembourg’s heraldic symbol since the 12th century — redrawn as something contemporary. It’s faceted and geometric, merging with the eight-pointed star from Minnesota’s state flag. Luxembourg and Minnesota, inseparable.

The colors follow the same logic — each one based on the landscape and symbolism of Minnesota and Luxembourg:

• Ardoise (our primary blue) is the color of slate roofs on Luxembourg village skylines. It’s also a good representation of a winter sky over the Mississippi, for Mni Sóta — where the water is the color of the sky — is what the Dakota called this place.
• Crimson is a rich red that’s based on the Roude Léiw himself.
• Ochre is the warm gold of Luxembourg’s painted façades, the orange-tinted plaster you see on houses throughout the country.
• Or Pâle, the soft off-white underlying the whole palette, is based on unpainted lime render, the finish beneath the paint on Luxembourg’s buildings.