A goose for Thanksgiving dinner was a perfect choice for the seven members of the family who were able to be there. During our preliminary arrangements, we had reserved a  free-range turkey of between 14 and 20 pounds from our favorite source: Peter Ludlow of the Mecox Bay Dairy farm in Bridgehampton. But our guest numbers were down by a few this year, and in the week before Turkey Day, we decided to make it Goose Day instead, going for a 12-pound gander.

Goose meat is, well, meaty. It’s all dark, which makes it preferable for those who find turkey breast a bit lacking in flavor. It had been a few — okay, many — years since I roasted a goose, so we consulted quite a few sources to make sure the oven temperature and cooking time were correct. If I do say so myself, it came out exactly right. 

I had forgotten that geese have huge cavities and after recognizing its capaciousness we took on the challenge of making a super stuffing — super in quantity as well as taste. After dinner, when all that was left of the bird were a few stray strands on the platter, we were delighted to have second helpings of stuffing.

Truly, the only argument against goose at Thanksgiving is the lack of leftovers. If we had stuck with tried, true, and traditional turkey, I would have lunched all weekend on turkey sandwiches made with the good rye bread from Goldberg’s, and indulged in a creamy turkey tetrazzini, a divine dish that usually makes an annual appearance at the end of November.

We do have a few leftover servings of a huge Indian pudding, made with cornmeal, as well as some pumpkin pies (which makes a tasty  breakfast). I’m told by my daughter — who, as editor of The Star’s magazine, EAST, is planning a holiday-historical feast at Almond on Tuesday evening — that pumpkin and other squashes, as well as corn meal, venison, and goose or other wild fowl, were indeed likely during the “first Thanksgiving” in 1621. 

The happy-clappy Thanksgiving story taught in grade school — at least back when I was a kid — turns out, in reality, to have been a convenient whitewashing of our real heritage. It’s very pleasant to think of the Wampanoag sharing their knowledge of the land, and their bounty of winter foods, with the English settlers in 1621 at Plymouth Plantation, but this cheerful view of this moment is seeing it all from the European perspective. The Wampanoag and other Native Americans today don’t so much celebrate the moment as mark it with a day of mourning.

Today, Americans of European descent are likely at least a bit more aware than I was as a child of the genocide of Native Americans that began in earnest with the Puritans in the Massachusetts colony. I wonder: Will the observance of Thanksgiving decline as a result? I hope not. I hope that we will always gather to enjoy our holiday meals, but that perhaps a bit more national self-reflection will be part of the conversation, before football talk and political bickering kicks in around the festive table.

Soon after the midterms I considered ordering a bumper sticker that would read: “Don’t Blame Me — I’m From East Hampton.”

That variant, of course, derives from the sensationally failed 1972 presidential candidacy of George McGovern, the liberal Democrat who was to carry only one state, Massachusetts, many of whose residents afterward proudly put “Don’t Blame Me — I’m From Massachusetts” bumper stickers on their cars. (The comparison, while admittedly clever, is, I confess, somewhat invidious inasmuch as Perry Gershon gave Lee Zeldin a much better run for his money. Had all 16,000 absentee ballots gone to Gershon, he would have won!)

McGovern’s striking “Getting It All Together” poster, rescued from dusty oblivion at The Star, has hung for years in our bedroom, testimony, I suppose, to the coupling of lofty ideals with dashed hopes. 

“Don’t forget to call on Wednesday,” I said to our eldest daughter, who lives in Ohio, a couple of days before the election. “Mary,” who had knocked on doors for Gershon, “will either be over the moon or under a cloud.”

I’m happy to say my prediction was wrong. While obviously disappointed with the First Congressional District result, her fighting spirit — an inspiration to me, a phlegmatic type — bent but did not break.

That Gershon swept all 19 election districts here, Montauk included, was good news, I argued, testimony to her — and to all of the other Bonac door-knockers’ efforts. So, don’t blame us.

I still remain mystified, though, that an incumbent who, while he voted against the “tax reform” bill, which gores our oxen locally by denying state income tax, property tax, and mortgage interest write-offs, but did nothing really to prevent the deficit-ballooning giveaway; who apparently fails to support extensive gun control laws — even in the face of repeated mass killings — and whose party is seemingly bent on denying insurance coverage to those with pre-existing conditions, and on meddling with Social Security and Medicare, would attract support from somewhat more than half of those, most of them aging middle-class homeowners I suspect, who turned out at the polls. 

As for immigration, I don’t know if Lee Zeldin — as the president does — tends to characterize all immigrants as members of the El Salvadoran gang MS-13, or if he is utterly laissez-faire when it comes to Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, but here too I would think he’d be out of sync with the district’s sizable Latino population.

So, don’t blame us — we’re from East Hampton.

The East Hampton Star staff has been making more frequent trips to the library next door ever since Starbucks installed a coffee machine on the front desk. This I know, not because we have a sophisticated indoor surveillance system, but because my second-floor window on the south side of the Star building looks onto the sidewalk that runs between our driveway and the library’s Main Street entryway.

If there is a universal routine shared above all others it is that coffee drinkers organize their days around the next cup. For many years, I had my second coffee of the day at Java Nation in Bridgehampton after dropping one of my kids off at school; I was nearly at a loss about what to do when that was no longer the case. I miss the morning crew, Dave and Don and that New Zealand guy and those whose names I never caught.

Coffee time is like that; you rarely introduce yourself to other regulars, even though the caffeine-fueled conversation might be the longest of the day. I see this happening at the library, too. Sheila Dunlop, who is often behind the front desk, and I are on a first-name basis, but I know the others only well enough to quickly nod and wish them a good morning.

Nonetheless, it seems to me that the library has become a more convivial place since the advent of Starbucks. At least those of us at The Star are beating a path to its door.

Many are the early mornings when I arrive at work before the library is open, however, and I count the minutes until I can shuffle over for a cup and a bit of conversation. Or not, silence being fine, too.

In “The Hurt Locker,” directed by a woman, Kathryn Bigelow, nine years before social media movements put a bullhorn to just how rare that was, we see a bomb squad specialist played by Jeremy Renner at loose ends back home from Iraq. To top off the boob-tube-and-supermarket boredom, a gray afternoon of clearing leaves from the gutters of his modest house helps put him over the edge. 

He rotates back in.

We see him again at movie’s end, suited up in his padded impact gear, large-limbed and huge-helmeted, resolutely waddling away from the camera like a blocky Minecraft character in search of the next I.E.D. The Baghdad street is dusty and leafless.

Movies aren’t life, but they do tend to drive the important points home. I’ve thought of Jeremy Renner miserably scooping leaves on three occasions recently — each one as I balanced atop a cheap four-foot Home Depot aluminum ladder, my feet covering the words “do not sit or step,” the ground uneven and softened by burrowing rodents, as I blindly reach for the collected detritus, inevitably mushy in this wettest of falls, one handful at a time, time after time, the ladder scooted in three-foot increments down the length of gutter, again and again, back of the house then front, slowly filling one plastic grocery bag after another. 

The pointlessness puts me in mind of the mocking words of a secretary I once worked with: “Next they’ll have you sweeping the sun off the roof.”

And just what kind of fall is this? If it isn’t pouring, it’s around the freezing mark, the damp driving the chill bone-deep. 

I used to like the cold. In my early 30s, near the end of a seven-year experiment in living simply on a maximum of $8 an hour west of the Mississippi, I worked outside every day for two full Fairbanks, Alaska, winters, one of them as a laborer on a construction site where a Schucks Auto Supply store was being built, and for 20 straight days at the beginning of 1999 the temperature didn’t reach as much as 20 below, with a low of about minus 50. (I remember because I record such things in calendars, Brett Kavanaugh-style, only without the artistry.)

That was an exceptional cold snap, and if in the depths of it I once carelessly left my earlobes exposed, frostbite swelling them into two small pieces of reddened fruit, that was just part of the adventure. 

When it comes to appendages, the ear, that odd cup of cartilage hung with a teardrop of flesh, is relatively insensate. Hands are another story. So the other day when I dipped mine repeatedly into gutters holding a quarter-inch of late-November rainwater, I thought it a fine idea to do so wearing nitrile gloves — you know, “the latex-free alternative”? The kind you don’t want to see your doctor pulling over his extended index finger? 

I was soon gasping in pain, having stumbled inside to run my hands under warm tap water for relief. It’s the moisture, I’m telling you, that brings the hurt. Fairbanks may be cold, “but it’s a dry cold,” to invert the old Johnny Carson joke.

Then there’s the matter of all that dead matter. I was get-a-beer friendly with a couple of English professors in college — a couple of a couple — who would say how the sight of bare trees always made them want to die. Or at least contemplate the idea of death, like Snoopy used to do, always with great profundity, from his doghouse as he watched the leaves fall.

At the other end of the spectrum is the opinion, equally an old saw, that the coming of crisp fall brings new life.

Well, which is it? Somehow, the prospect of cramming a half-acre’s worth of leaves into oversized brown paper bags kills the discussion.

Baylis Greene is an associate editor at The Star

Long-ago Bridgehampton was wild. And by wild I don’t mean the wolves, slander lawsuits, and dispossessing the native people that kept the English colonists elsewhere busy. What set Bridgehampton apart from the more staid village centers in East Hampton and Southampton was its remoteness.

Set away from the sharp eye of the magistrates by half a day’s ride on the frontier between the two “plantations,” as they were known, standards of behavior might have been, shall we say, loose.

Exhibit A has to be John Wick, who settled in Bridgehampton by about 1695 and ran the tavern and inn. Wick was said perhaps to be a murderer; peddlers might check in for the night but never check out. He also was among the leading men of the time, which might or might not be related to his homicidal tendencies.

His Bull’s Head Inn had a bar in its front room where rum was dealt out, a “short horn” two fingers deep, a “long horn” four fingers deep, and for a “good stiff horn” they put on the thumb. They used to say there had been rum enough in that room to float a 74-ton sloop. The rum, from Boston, would be landed at Northwest, and carted; Sag Harbor was still a salt meadow, years away from becoming a port.

Sometime later, legend is that Scuttle Hole, a glacial swampy pond, got its name when a peddler reported having to scuttle like a crab off his wagon as its wheel sank in the muck. One thing led to another, and the bog’s person-grabbing nature was memorialized in verse, which I share below.

The Curse of Scuttle Hole

Beware all strangers where you roam

Or leave the tranquil bliss of home;

Ne’er at the peril of your soul,

Plant foot in cursed Scuttle Hole.

May Scuttle Hole not a blessing know,

While water runs or grass shall grow;

But evils fall as fast they can

On ground accursed by God and man.

The judgment day is rolling ’round,

And Scuttle Hole shall hear the sound

Of demons, who shall ring the knell.

And Scuttle Hole go down to Hell.

One of the few positives of being home ill for several days, even with the flu, is that you have time to think. Or not. In my case this week, 30 straight hours of sleep were punctuated by only brief periods of lucidity. During one of them, I realized I was wrong to have made light of my too-late, Thanksgiving-eve vaccination in the paper last week. 

Generally, I believe it is in bad taste to speak publicly about one’s afflictions. It took me years to talk about the red meat allergy that I showed symptoms of in the early 1990s. I believe I was Patient Zero in East Hampton, likely having been exposed to lone star ticks while working as a field archaeologist in backwoods Georgia at the time. I had the allergy so early that one of today’s experts on it dismissed it at the time as impossible. But again, I brag, for which, by the rule on talking about one’s maladies, I will pay a price. Still, it’s nice to be number one in something, no? 

Doubling down, I return to the flu. The first time I had it that I recall was in the mid-1990s. I was working for a television documentary producer. The flu was going around New York City, and one morning I watched a co-worker fall from chatty into stupor in the space of minutes. I have not forgotten the speed with which he went from fine to ill. “It was amazing!” I said. Not so many days later, it took hold of me as well, per the rule.

Last Saturday was a replay of sorts. I was working on my truck in the driveway, close to completing a bumper replacement that had been on my to-do list for months, when it struck. I put my tools in the cab, locked the door, and crept inside to rest. 

It may seem odd, but I realize that since I’ve been older getting sick has sharply increased my interest in the colonial era. When I had pneumonia a few years back, I listened to a novel set Revolutionary Westchester. This time, I borrowed an audiobook online via the East Hampton Library and learned about the Dutch founding of New Amsterdam, then read about 50 pages of a biography of Increase Mather, the father of Cotton Mather, and an early leader of the church and Harvard College in 1600s Boston.

What to make of this is not clear to me. It could be that the timing, around Thanksgiving, with talk of Pilgrims in the air, makes for an obvious lead in. But to my mind, the view is as much of a factor. The limbs of the bare oaks and black tupelo in the swamp outside my window in changing light are like bones, making me think of the long-ago past and my own mortality. 

How do you tolerate the cold? I don’t seem capable of tolerating winter at all these days. When the temperature drops down below freezing, I find myself unwilling to do much of anything except go to bed and read a book. And, for some reason, a really cold and blustery winter day always makes me start thinking about delicious recipes and hearty meals. 

I’m told that when your core temperature drops, the body signals a need for more calories, and I guess that’s what happened to me when the thermometer plummeted earlier this week. Before today’s paper went to bed I had filled the pantry shelves as well as the refrigerator and freezer with more than we could possibly expect to need anytime soon. I asked my husband to have a look at all the groceries I’d brought home and estimate how long he thought it would take us to eat every morsel in the larder — for example, if we found ourselves entirely isolated by a snowstorm — but he just looked at me as if I’d gone a bit loco. We have enough on hand for a couple of hurricanes at least, and a power outage or two.

We’ve got both frozen homemade chili and store-bought chili. Because potatoes and warm winter suppers are synonymous, we’ve got three kinds: Yukon gold, big red, and sweet. We’ve got three kinds of squash, too: acorn, spaghetti, and butternut. We’ve got parsnips and some puréed celery root, and I nabbed an eggplant at the store just because it looked handsome. As for carrots, we’ve got a package of those tiny ones that dry out before you eat them and a couple of healthy bunches. Carrots are necessary in a December soup, but I guess I’d better start cooking. Minestrone, perhaps? Or a Greek avgolemono?

Sweet Pea, our Animal Rescue Fund of the Hamptons “ARFan,” is well taken care of, too. The veterinarian has told us she has gained too much weight — gee, I wonder how that happened? —and she is on what he calls a “metabolic diet” for the winter. Sweet Pea has a large case of special canned food and double bags of dry pellets in the pantry, as well, and won’t need anything else until Valentine’s Day at the soonest.

Obviously, this impulse to overstock is not just an uncontrollable urge to prepare for weather emergencies but also to prepare for holiday company. Whatever the weather, visitors will be arriving in the coming weeks. I know just who to invite.

Can you believe, 10 percent of high school students, when questioned, think Judge Judy is a member of the Supreme Court, when, as everyone knows, she’s on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals? (Just kidding!)

Actually, we know a judge on that court, a high school classmate of mine who, when asked by the Reagan administration to interview for the job of F.B.I. director, declined, referring them instead to a man he thought highly of, Robert Mueller.

Yes, Virginia, there are principled people who happen to be Republicans. One such was recently laid to rest with heartfelt eulogies that made you yearn — liberals are always yearning, when they’re not hand-wringing — for decency again.

“He was a good guy,” Maureen Dowd said of the late President George H.W. Bush when asked by Judy Woodruff during a Channel 13 “NewsHour” round-table discussion for her final thoughts. High praise indeed from a columnist whose words can flay you alive at 20 paces. Dana Carvey, his chief lampooner, whom the president later befriended, was also of that mind.

My brother-in-law, who had been rendered nostalgic as well, did have one cavil, having distinctly remembered the late 41st president saying we could win a nuclear exchange. Oh well. We’re rid of that fantasy now . . . aren’t we? And there was Willie Horton, and the turkey shoot in the desert, the first shots fired in what became, with his son at the helm, a tragic mission in the Mideast, a “mission” that has, after all these years, yet to be defined.

Taken all in all, though, the late president was an honorable, accomplished man, a Yalie, who, while the most competitive person Jim Baker ever met, had the common touch, and who, while born to privilege, felt the need to serve his fellow citizens, to serve his country. He had a generous spirit, Carvey said, was gracious too. And what’s not to like about a guy who, confined to a wheelchair, celebrates his 90th birthday by jumping out of a plane? 

You do yearn, especially in these self-serving days, for honest public servants like the late president. Was he the last president to raise taxes? Perhaps the last Republican president to do so; anathema to those in his party clinging to the tenet — to the long-discredited fantasy, but no matter — that tax cut tides raise all boats. Tell that to the middle class, whatever’s left of it. And doing the right thing, of course, cost him.

So, we go about, like Diogenes, looking for an honest man, a man of principle, a man of decency, a man of generous spirit, a gracious man. My classmate is one, and by his account, which is good enough for me, so is Robert Mueller. We await his findings with bated breath. 

Merry Christmas to you all. It’s not quite 60 years since I first began to celebrate Christmas with the Protestant family I married into. I was brought up in a secular Jewish family that didn’t do much more in December than light a special menorah for the eight nights of Hanukkah. (I remember my maternal grandfather giving me chocolate Hanukkah “gelt” each year, too, and I cherish the brass hanukiah with two lions of Judah I inherited.) 

Hanukkah took place this year during the first week of December, which feels like eons ago! The last two weeks have been a head-spinning round of community events: choral concerts, carol singing, craft sales, and all the pageants the children get involved in. 

Opportunities for wishing people a Happy Hanukkah come far less frequently than do chances to wish everyone a Happy Christmas — perhaps because there are far fewer public celebrations surrounding the Festival of Lights. 

One of the most uplifting things about this time of year, for me, is the merry round of annual holiday concerts in the schools, and the various theatrical productions put on by dance studios and student troupes. These shows truly are one of the nicest perquisites of being a grandparent.

Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” was performed twice at Guild Hall’s John Drew Theater two weeks ago by students of the Hayground School in Bridgehampton, which two of my grandchildren attend. A total humbug sitting near me in the audience at the second performance semi-humorously griped that the experience amounted to an hour and a half of trying without success to hear, let alone understand, what the youthful cast was saying. . . . Well, I say, try sitting in the front of the theater next time! The kids may not all enunciate as well as Laurence Olivier, but just the experience of memorizing snippets of Shakespeare’s language is educational, and coming onto the stage as part of a creative community is obviously a joyful ritual. 

Then, last week, came Studio 3 dance school’s three performances of “Mixed Nuts,” a mashup of “The Nutcracker” and a more contemporary musical (in this case, “The Wizard of Oz”) at the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor. One of my granddaughters — following in the slipper-clad footsteps of an older cousin — simply loves the classes she takes at 

Studio 3, which is tucked away in a Bridgehampton commercial building off Butter Lane. The instructors — Diane Shumway, Meredith Shumway, Jenna Mazanowski, and others — have nurtured a stable of young dancers with talent that in some instances is truly startling. There were elements of ballet, jazz, and lyrical dance in this year’s “Mixed Nuts,” and the “bravos” and “bravas” at the end of Saturday night’s show were sincere.

Perhaps the most enlightening, and most surprising, entertainment this December — last week, as well — was the Ross Lower School’s enactment of plays the students had written themselves after studying the lives of three inspiring historic figures: Mary Anning, Louis Braille, and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Dr. King’s place in history is known to all. The story of Louis Braille is also celebrated, but likely new to the young thespians: As a young blind boy, Braille invented a series of raised dots that translated into letters and words, making it possible for him to read. I myself had never heard before of the third subject, the British paleontologist Mary Anning, a dedicated fossil hunter in the early-19th century who discovered crucial artifacts of the Jurassic period in the cliffs near Lyme Regis.

The biggest surprise was to see one of my grandsons perform as Dr. King. While some of my grandchildren are African-American, this particular grandson is not. Watching a blond 8-year-old embody Dr. King was both somewhat humorous and absolutely heartwarming.

You’d think that a country wanting to be great again would return to what made it great by welcoming those who, having seen the worst of things, are resolved to better their lives. What more worthy goal? 

And yet the pilgrims, who would a century ago have been met in New York Harbor by the Statue of Liberty, are confronted at our southern border by barbed wire and tear gas.

If you want to make America great again, let them in. (In an orderly fashion, of course.) So the parents can work hard and the children can learn. And, perhaps, in their striving they can teach us, who may have forgot why America has for so long been hope incarnate. 

I hope — sense — that, absent disaster, better things will come, despite the divisiveness so evident now. 

It’s the younger generation I’m pinning my hopes on, a generation less in thrall than its elders to ideology, more amenable to working things out. They, I think, will afford genuine opportunity to all, but will insist that our collective health be as paramount as the achievements of each one of us. In other words, I think that we could become a more equitable society, without going to hell in a handbag.

It’s not either the individual or the group — it’s all of us, together. We’ve got to get back to that. To shaking hands rather than turning our backs — or being shot in the back.

It’s not Communism or Socialism that I’m promoting, but amity, Amityism. Can we not think of the welfare of everyone even as we celebrate an individual’s success? Even as we celebrate, even as we delight in, our own voices? 

It’s not all about the money. And the immigrants, who value family above all, know that. It’s about doing one’s best and in doing so contributing to the whole. That’s what made this country great. There is no better society, no better place. Yes, they’re doing great in China, but at the expense of their souls, I think. There is more joy, more potential joy, anyway, in a country where not only initiative but also the freedom to speak one’s mind is equally valued. I don’t envy the Chinese, though to read of that country’s alchemy of coercion and economic uplift is fascinating. 

In the end, though, it is the free and united spirit that will triumph, or ought to triumph. 

So, don’t tear-gas them, let them in.