Your Health A Holiday For Health

Dominion, Volume 32, Issue 68, 13 December 1938, Page 5

Your Health A Holiday For Health

I low To Spend 'l our Weeks 01

Vacation

are you going to spend your holidays? If you want to come back full of the vitality for which we go seeking in vacation days, choose your spot with care. Go where there is an abundance of fresh food in supply, and guard against flics, mosquitoes and a too strenuous time

Mary, Nan and I took our vacation early this year. The three of ns live together. Mary is a girlhood friend of mine. Nan is a child we have adopted, and I am just a little old maid interested in humanity. We felt we had to have a change. As Nau put it, “We wanted to go somewhere else and do something different, and do it right away." There was not a doubt, that we needed a change, but with little change in our pocket-books, or anywhere else for that matter, to get a vacation was a big problem. We had not- gone far along in the game of planning when I knew 1 was a bit too shy'in eash to du anything but take my vacation at home. Mary said she and Nan would go somewhere not far away where a vacation would fit the family’s purse, and where they would be close to nature. Mary yearned to live a simple life, she said, to eat simple food, to listen' most of the day to a gay brook and to drink its clet)r, cool water. When she mentioned the particular “baek-to-nature” spot to which she thought of going with Nan. I gasped. "What, that place eaten up with flies.”’

“"Well, what of that? What harm in a fly or two?” “Harm a-plenty,” I said. “Do yon know that nothing is too clean for a fly and nothing too dirty? A fly will alight on all sorts of tilth and germs and then' trail that tilth to the choicest food or to the elean lips of a baby. Positively, Mary, the only place where a fly has any right to be, is on the end of a fishing line.” . To make a long story short. Mary and N'an packed off to a farm that stood just about one hundred per cent, high in food, milk and water sanitation.

The very first letter 1 got from Mary was enthusiastic. She had to admit, she said, that, there was something in these modern ideas on health after all. She thanked me for giving her the tip on an ideal vacation spot. She was glad now that she had gone where the water and milk supply is safe, and where there is an abundance of fresh fruits, vegetables, and Where the house is protected against flies and mosquitos.

She said that If Nan had gone to a children’s summer camp, she could not be living a much more regular life — arising and going to bed by the clock and having her meals and naps on time. Both of them were getting their exercise gradually and the sum, in their new sun suits, just as gradually, increasing the time live to ten minutes each day and keeping out of the sun during the hottest hour.-,. And now, what about me and my vacation? Play is a change of. occupation. I thought. 1 am not going to do anything that 1 have to do ordinarily, unless I want to do it. Gleefully I bid the alarm clock. Whenever I cared to, 1 slept a little later than was my custom. I ate a breakfast that was nourishing and easily prepared, which included a big glass of milk. Breakfast finished, I curled up in an easy-chair and read the newspaper. Then 1 took a walk in the morning sunshine an'd exercised before the sun got too hot. In the afternoon I just lazed around. 1 got*a good book, picked out a quiet spot in the house or-out-of-doors, and then forgot that there was anything more important in the whole wide world than to read that book. Frequently I changed the routine of the day. Sometimes I took a dip in a nearby swimming pool, or played a round of golf or-luxuriated in the sun. It was during the very first one of these baths that a little verse of “The Cheerful Cherub” from which Nan often babbles, kept running through my mind: I wish I had a sun-baked bill. Where I could go and lie for days, And never think or do a thing. But soak up ultra-violet rays.

But remembering particularly that with all its curative powers, sunshine can give one an ugly burn, I determined to keep my sunbaths within bounds. Twice during my vacation I took a trip across the bay. One week-end I spent at a nearby beach. Did I enjoy my holiday? I should say so. This is the one year I did not have to come home from a vacation and take a rest. Mary and Nan, too, are shouting from the house-tops about their trip. All three of us look and feel as we should after taking a real vacation.

— (Contributed by the Department or Health).