And is not the Swiss winter season an ideal time? Follow that tailing-party! An endless row of sleds zigzagging their way to some point where one of those typically good Swiss inns will provide a tempting dinner and dance music as well! Either can be enjoyed outdoors, for the season of white in the mountains is one long period of sunny days, where the noon temperature, in spite of ice and snow, lures to open-air picnics, and the carefully maintained Swiss rinks are more and more hailed as nature's own unparalleled ballrooms.

While the foreign winter guests are the chief figures in Switzerland's winter frolics, many experts in the manifold varieties of winter Sport are recruited from the natives, for they, of course, learn skating, skiing, and tobogganing when mere babies.

The week between Christmas and New Year is visiting week among the peasants of the mountain regions. Card-parties are arranged almost daily, for the Swiss are enthusiastic players of their national card game, “Jass,” and it is not an uncommon sight to see three generations emerge from the same home, all equipped with skis, all bound on the same errand—a Kaffeeklatsch and Jass at some neighboring house. In justice to the hardworking Swiss peasant women be it said, however, that after the holidays the card-parties are replaced by knitting- and spinning-bees.

A special kind of bread is also baked at this time of the year, known as “New Year's bread,” and its extra ingredients include milk, butter, eggs, and raisins. That every housewife is ambitious to excel her neighbor in the quality of her product is only natural and human!

Almost every community has now its own amateur theatrical guild, which presents plays both tragic and comic with an earnestness which never fails to impress the audience. On New Year's day is given their gala performance, and they do not have to invent any advertising schemes to fill the house!

New Year's eve here, as all over the world, is given to general merrymaking and when the multitude of wondrously tuneful church-bells announce the beginning of a new year in glorious, soul-stirring chorus, resounding throughout the land, bonfires will flare up on the mountain heights and young men will start threshing on some specially constructed

PLAYTIME FOR EVERYBODY—SON ON SKIS, MOTHER ON A TOBOGGAN

wooden platforms above their village—a strange invocation for a good harvest to come. Members of the local singing society, and there is one to be found in the tiniest village, will now go from house to house “caroling” and offering New Year’s wishes.

On the first day of the year, many a farmer will first of all consult the sky; should it be red, it is considered an omen of storms, fires, and even war. For mere good luck, too, many a person will avoid encountering a woman on New Year’s morning; to meet men or children, however, is considered very fortunate.

Why do such ancient and curious customs still linger in our enlightened age, one wonders, and then remembers that they are undoubtedly relics of beliefs dating back to times when ignorance fostered superstition. And, while some people may regard the observance of such customs as “rather foolish,” others find them “interesting and picturesque,” and hope that they may never die out entirely.