The one-room school predominates in western North Dakota. Libraries are few, and most of the people fail to take advantage of loaning facilities offered by State libraries. Farm families in all parts of the State participate in various seasonal activities. During the spring and summer months, school, church, club, and old settlers picnics are scheduled frequently. When harvest season arrives the farmer is exceptionally busy, but always has time to welcome the visitors from town, who come out to watch the threshers and often stay for a cook-car dinner. Later in the fall, especially in the eastern counties, young people participate in strawstack parties. Dances and card parties are held in community halls and barn lofts during the winter. Winter activities are limited by heavy snowfalls, which often keep communities and farms snow-bound for days. Main-traveled highways are kept open except in unusually bad weather, but side roads are often drifted over for weeks at a time. Then the radio becomes the chief source of entertainment in the farm home; radio reception on the open prairie is exceptionally good. In winter the western farmers have an advantage over those of the east, for they get less snowfall, and chinooks (warm dry winds which descend from the Rocky Mountains) often temper the weather and melt the snow, permitting social life to continue almost uninterrupted. In every rural community "fair week" is an important date. Farmers take their best cattle, hogs, sheep, and poultry to compete with their neighbors' entries for the prized blue ribbons. Farm women select their finest handiwork, their choicest jars of jellies, jams, and pickles, to enter in competition. Cookies, cakes, and pies are baked both to exhibit and to fill the picnic baskets, for when the family goes to the fair everyone is prepared to spend the day; one or two hurry home in the evening to do the chores, and return in time for the grandstand events at night. Almost every county has its annual fair in June or July, the oldest being the Pembina County Fair, which has been held at Hamilton each year since 1894. Even before this Pembina County Fair, a State fair under State subsidy was being held annually in Grand Forks, where the citizens had donated 80 acres of land for that purpose. When the first State legislature met, it created a department of agriculture, one of the duties of which was to hold an annual agricultural exhibit. Now State help is also received by the fair associations at Fargo and Minot.