It was the annual Swiss festival on the first weekend in September and for the first time in over 10 years I got to go. Swiss Days is a very Swiss inspired festival. It is held in Midway Utah where most of the arcitetcure is Swiss inspired due to the people whom settled the town. Midway is a beautiful little town nestled in the green mountains with plenty of fields and open space to keep it the small town that it is. The festival is held at the town square (yes they are that small they have a town square). It is largely run by the church. All of the profits from the food goes straight to the missionaries. I was told that they support all the missionaries from Africa. A lot of the food and all of the man hours are donated in order to give the most amount of money to these missionaries, and what good food it is!!! My favorite is the ham and Swiss sandwich which is more than just a ham and cheese. They also have a wonderful knockwurst sandwich and one of the must haves is the scones the size of a serving platter.they also have yummy baked goods like Swiss bread, delicious cookies of different varieties and the iconic Swiss cookie called a Bratzelis. 
I love the Swiss days atmosphere. The cute little Swiss miss. The yodeling, the puppet show, the dancers the yodeling, the horns, did I mention the yodeling? I know its can be silly sounding but I love it. maybe its because its tied to good memories, maybe its built into my DNA or maybe I am just weird but it makes me happy.
I have been going to Swiss days for as long as I can remember. My heritage is part Swiss, and my mom being a florist had a booth there every year. We kids worked in the booth as soon as we could count backwards. (We had to do math and figure out how much change to give the patrons.) It was at Swiss days where I learned percents, division, multiplication, taxes and how to make change. We Loved it. When we got a little older our entrepreneur skills kicked in and we started making our own money by creating a product and selling it. When I was smaller we made old fashioned wooden stilts with my Dad. I remember late nights screwing gluing, and staining the stilts and depending on your age we each had a different job. The smallest kids would put the screws in the pre-drilled holes. The next age would be the gluers, and the older ones were the stainer's, drillers, and sanders The leftovers would wipe down the stain and stack. Dad handed all the cutting.
As we got older we began making different things. My sister and I often put together wreaths and other flower arrangements of our own
After all the products were made it was selling time. We learned the value of advertising. We would take turns parading around on our own set of stilts until people would ask us where we got them. We would promptly send them over to our booth to pick up a pair of their own. Often giving lessons on how to walk on them.We even wore the Swiss garb. Dirndls for the girls and lederhousin for the boys.
This year we did a girls trip. We took the motor home up on Friday and got the lay of the land. When it was time to close up shop we headed back to the motor home and stayed up late playing games, talking, and laughing, laughing, laughing. It was so good to be with my mom and sisters. We got up early on Saturday morning and shopped shopped shopped. It was nice to see that my entrepreneur skills were still intact when we came upon a cute broom stick that I really liked. It turned out to be an old crafter friend of my moms. She was complaining that her broomsticks weren't selling as good as she liked. I piped up, "what you need is someone to advertise them for you. You need someone to walk around with one and tell em where you got it."
She said "I'll give you one for free if you would do that for me."
Of course I would!! So I did as I promised and sent probably 40 people her way. They started selling like hot cakes.
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| cute little boy in traditional garb. We had outfits just like this. |
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