Winter

The winter season is the oldest thing this register measures. It was invented on a wager in the Engadine in 1864 and spread from there to every mountain village that could sell the same four months, and then outward to the warm places that sell the same months for the opposite reason. December to March, with Christmas, New Year and the February holidays as the weeks a place is judged by.

Two kinds of place share one season here, and the shelves keep them apart. The alpine villages are towns where the hotel is a house on a street and the mountain is the territory nobody owns. The winter-warm addresses — the Caribbean islands, Los Cabos, the Florida coasts — sell the same calendar to people escaping the same weather.

A house on this page is open when the place is alive and shut or half-staffed when it is not. Where a property keeps a second summer season, the record says so and names both windows, because a hotel running two staffs and two kitchens is two different houses in one building.