Quick follow-up - knitting an winter traditions

It's funny what kinds of things I'm unearthing from my old Meyers Modeblatt issues. Remember issue no. one, which had only baby clothes knitting patterns? Personally I had thought this was the least interesting issue of all, because it had no fashion. Well, think again... I am actually currently knitting the little jacket shown on the page there, for my cousin's baby. She discovered that knitted things are so much more soft and flexible and easier to put on. Simple as that. Not so simple though, I must say, was finding the right wool. I was used to baby wool back from school - soft, pure wool, available mainly in pastel color, they came in plastic packs that had a small embroidery motif pattern printed on the cardboard label. Well, that's not available anymore, and all the department stores now carry half or fully synthetic baby wool. Now, who would want that?! Thankfully I live in a 'burb that isn't trendy and still has a certain amount of "old-fashioned" shops. Including a wool shop, which doesn't exist anymore in downtown for example. There I actually found pure wool baby wool - and thankfully it uses the same needle size as in the pattern. There's no gauge in the pattern, as probably all baby wool available then was the same anyway... Otherwise, I must say the pattern is not very difficult to read and easy enough to follow!

On another note, in last week's issue, there had been this article on the revival of a winter tradition of the Prättigau valley - older kids playing "horse" and drawing sleights in which the younger kids would sit.
 
Well, it turns out, my dad, who grew up in the valley, actually played "horse" several times as a teenager. A colleague at work, who's a little younger than me but grew up in this area too remembers sitting in a sleigh as a small child. It seems though that nowadays, it's not in practice anymore.

 When I sent this on to my mum, she remembered another tradition, Chalandamarz, (read about it here), that my grandfather would participate in in his youth. Whilst dad has no photos of him as "horse", there is one of my maternal grandfather at Chalandamarz - he's the one in the middle up front:

This would have been in the 1920s I guess. This tradition at least still goes on, and has also been immortalised in the iconic children's book Schellenursli. I'm always fascinated what loops looking through these old magazines I'm sometimes being sent on, or what I discover there...