54 



Sierra Cluh Bulletin. 



or the midsummer holidays. We are so much better fed, better clothed, 

 better housed and protected from infection and contagion that we can 

 positively enjoy and delight in exposure to winter cold and chilling 

 blasts, which our ancestors would have shrunk from with dread. 



One of the most interesting changes which strike the visitor to 

 Switzerland in the last ten years is the remarkable extent to which the 

 fashionable season and crowd of visitors in that charming little country 

 has been changed. Twenty years ago Switzerland, the playground of 

 Europe, was almost exclusively a summer resort; now it has become 

 emphatically a winter resort, and all the really smart and fashionable 

 people of England, France and Germany spend not their July and 

 August or September in Switzerland, but their Christmas holidays and 

 the greater part of January. It is distinctly "poor form" to go to 

 Switzerland in summer. 



Already some of our famous summer mountain resorts, in the Adiron- 

 dacks, the Alleghanies, the Berkshires, the White Mountains, the Green 

 Mountains, and the rugged hills of Maine are beginning to open for a 

 winter season as well as for summer. For a bracing, refreshing change, 

 and a complete reversal of the ordinary currents of life, a week at 

 Christmas time will do the tired business man or the worried house- 

 mother almost as much good as two weeks in July or August. Though, 

 of course, they should have both. The best possible Christmas present 

 you can make your children is a week of skating, tobogganing, and snow- 

 tramping in the country. The most valuable and highly appreciated 

 New Year's gift for your employees is three or four days' extra vaca- 

 tion with full pay, for skating and coasting just after the Christmas 

 rush. Do not waste your time and money and nerve force giving ridic- 

 ulous presents to people which they cannot use and are not allowed 

 to throw away. Give them vacations, excursion tickets, week-end invita- 

 tions to the country, snow picnics and ice parties. 



Christmas has become little short of a sanitary nuisance of late years ; 

 a nerve-racking, treadmill grind of "pay-back" present-giving, an orgy 

 of bankrupt livers, "busted" pocketbooks, theater parties, restaurant sup- 

 pers, and other forms of foul air suicide. Here's a chance to take the 

 curse off and get back to pristine simplicity, joyousness and wholesome- 

 ness. Spend your day on the crisp snow of the hill amid the creak of 

 the sled-runners or on the diamond-black ice of the river, to the singing 

 and ringing of the skate-blades, instead of in some matinee where the 

 air would curdle if you poured acid into it, or even some church where 

 last Sunday's collection of bugs is warmed up and served over again, 

 and you'll have a plenary indulgence and dispensation for all the turkey 

 and mince pie you want to eat. 



We are only just beginning to realize as we should the advantages 

 of our American climate and the charms of the Christmas season. It 

 is not necessary for us to go to the Alpine summits ; we have the snap 

 and sparkle of the Alps at our very doors. 



