Freedom and Friendliness.

January in New Zealand is a period of freedom and friendliness; for communion with air and earth, with sea and sky.

It demands the primitive palliatives of wind-in-the-hair and sun-in-the-face which never fail to soothe the seething soul and jazz up the juices of the jaundiced. For in January the cogs of commerce whirr less wildly, the mills of money slow their gristing and much of humanity shakes off the shackles of shekels. There is a pause in life's pitful fever. Vocation is on vacation. Men, maids and matrons camp under canvas, or the star-studded dome of night, defying dyspepsia with pan and pannikin wooing Morpheus and moreporks, and braving the hazards and haphazards of the mosquito belt.