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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 5, Issue 8 (February 1, 1931)

[section]

“When it's Springtime in the Rockies I'm coming back to you.”

So runs a popular and pretty gramophone song of the day. Here in New Zealand, where midsummer and holiday-time so happily coincide, it is the approach of Christmas that brings joyful anticipations of a return to the old home, to reunions with old friends, and to days of release from toil, days above all spent in the open air. Perhaps New Zealanders do not sufficiently realise how fortunate they are to be able to enjoy their great holiday of the year under climatic conditions so different from those of the land from which their fathers came.

The glory of the out-of-doors, the joy of the road, the bush, the mountains and the water, are theirs in the season when they have most leisure. Even if that leisure time be spent chiefly in travelling rather than in a quiet rest in some easily reached country nook, or some old familiar haunt, there is the change of scene, the change of company, the interest in making new friends, that have their part in physical and mental recuperation.

To everyone his holiday taste, to everyone his spot beloved over all other places, his restorative for jaded body and jangled nerves. Some will travel the length of the Dominion to meet old friends; scattered families are together again for a few too-brief days or hours. There are some whose holiday wants are easily satisfied. I know a veteran editorial toiler on a city newspaper whose idea of supreme holiday bliss is to get into his oldest clothes, get his fishing tackle and his tin of smellful bait, and dream the hours away in the stern of his small boat anchored out in the bay. Pipe in mouth, hat slouched over one eye, line in hand, he sits there in utter content, and lets old Time go by. If the fish like to come and hook themselves on, well and good, if not, he has no complaint. Those days in the boat prolong his life; he needs no medicine but his week-end rest cure, lengthened to a perfectly delightful fortnight at Christmastime.

There are others, the young folk—lucky, lucky youngsters, to be just youngsters!—whose delight is the merry bustle of quick-change travel, and who can play all day and dance all night, the more crowded the holiday place the better. Everyone to his taste—and hers. And a glory of our land is that there is so much that is new for those lucky youthful ones—something new always round the turn of the road.