Happy Monday! We are waking up to a very crisp morning, last night it snowed down to 500 meters, which is hard for most of my American friends to quantify, so lets put it this way, the Eiffel tower is 324 meters tall. So we almost got snow in the valley. It’s a perfect situation because everywhere we turn it looks like a winter wonderland, the sun is shining (as it usually does after a big snow) and best of all the sidewalks are clean and there is not brown slush all over the roads.  Last week our village had the annual turnip carving for the Räbliechtli Um-zug~ Which is a turnip light parade.

We met one of our neighbor friends at 5:00 and walked over to the Catholic Church in the town center, to be there by 5:15. The walk takes a normal adult about 3 minutes but we were walking with two 4-year-old’s so that slowed us down a bit. At the chapel we sat quietly for a few minutes where some guy talked about the origins of the tradition- but my German/Swiss-German wasn’t good enough to understand it. The children all sang a little song about the light parade and we all lined up outside to get on with the show!

It’s a cute little tradition for the young children of the village to make a carved turnip lantern and march around while some of the older kids wearing white robes ring bells to lead the way. A few ladies in charge carried torches and made sure the kids stayed behind them by stretching a rope across the road.

The turnip carving is a little like a Jack o lantern but small and portable.

In different Canton’s in Switzerland they put the carved turnips on sticks but most of the lanterns at our parade where hanging with wire.

Here is a clip on how the lanterns are made:

After the parade everyone met back at the school yard which is in the center of town and ate hotdogs and “turnip tea” which turns out to be a fruit-herb tea. I love learning about these very Swiss traditions and sharing them with you- this is real Swiss village life!