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.

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. 

We’ve returned from a Thanksgiving dinner on the Eastern Shore that would have made even Ina Garten envious. And the house, whose core dates to 1876 or so, was beautiful, the most beautiful one I’ve ever been in.  

Fearing that we might wear thin — I mean, our repertoire is not endless — we stayed the first two nights at the Tidewater Inn in Easton, about 20 minutes from my cousin’s house, and while the room was a bit cramped (people must have been smaller and/or less demanding in the 1940s), we stuck it out. And I’m glad we did, for Frederick Douglass, as we learned from flags at every street corner, was a native son. As was Harriet Tubman, the bartender at the Pub told us.

“Of course, he couldn’t wait to get out of Easton,” Mary said, but still it was interesting to know he was from there, and to know that there is a well-reviewed biography of him that has just come out.

Driving around there isn’t the easiest thing: There are deep ditches alongside the roads, bordered by dark, tall pines. Several times in those dark pines we had to back up nervously, trying to find our way to the tree in whose thick bark was implanted their tiny house number.

Mike, my cousin Margot said, rather liked it that way. It reminded me of my late Uncle Louis, who lived up on Waterworks Road, in Sewickley, Pa., and insisted that the rutted dirt road remain untended. Still, everyone descended, or ascended.

Uncle Louis and Aunt Gwenny’s was a gathering place, much like my cousin Margot’s. She welcomes you with open arms as you stare, mouths agape, not knowing that people still ive like this. Many bedrooms, many living rooms, many fireplaces, and many dogs — five black Labs by actual count, all as welcoming as she.

While the setting is rarefied, on the banks of the Tred Avon River, with Oxford just across the way, one feels, once having been given the grand tour, at home.

And, man, can Margot cook, a fact hitherto largely unknown to me. Mary, who’s used to playing hostess to two score on Thanksgiving, wanted — wanted very much — to help, but everything was in order, everything taken care of. She was utterly delighted when told she could wash the dishes. And I, wanting to be useful too, made margaritas — the recipe for which, vouchsafed by East Hampton’s own Alex Silva, you can find in one of Ina Garten’s early cookbooks.

There were 11 of us at dinner, the youngest being 3, and there was affection all around, everyone having a chance to talk, everyone having a chance to listen, and everyone having a chance simply to reflect in silence. It was an exceedingly pleasant feeling, one that I’m not sure I’ve ever experienced in quite the same way before. 

It brought to mind the general’s toast in “Babette’s Feast,” one of my favorites, and its lines from Psalm 85: “Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other.”

The report from the pediatrician was not good. The fever and cough that kept Ellis home from school last week was the flu or had turned into it along the way. Word went out to the various siblings, friends, and family members: Get your flu shot; even if you were already exposed, the vaccination would lessen the flu’s severity if it did pop up.

I received the order while sitting in my car on Main Street, Sag Harbor, two spaces away from a red pickup truck with a life-size horse made of driftwood lashed, standing tall, in the bed, which was amusing, top-shelf Instagram bait, though it has nothing to do with this story. 

Being sentimental about such things, I headed straight for the Bridgehampton Rite Aid, where for the past couple of years I have gone for my annual prick, and conversation about deep-fried turkey, as I realized when I walked in the door.  

Somehow, the approach of Thanksgiving is an unconscious signal that it is time to go for my shot. I had engaged the pharmacist several years ago on the subject of my red meat allergy, and by the time we stepped into the small office room off to the side of the counter, we had become fast friends.

The guy was a committed deep fryer and ran through the steps for me. My friends Chick and Chris had given me a burner-fryer rig a long time ago, I said, but I had never screwed up the courage to give it a shot, having seen stories about burning oil blowing the roof off garages. That sort of thing. Well, my pharmacist helpmate said, the trick is to determine how much oil to pour into the pot, using cold water, your turkey, and a marker of some sort beforehand. Science! Then, crucial, he said, you slide the bird into the hot oil with the burner temporarily off. Danger past, you turn the burner on, and let the magic begin.

This year, alas, there would be no fried turkey, the pharmacist said. The family had decided to gather at his sister’s place, and she was a confirmed roaster. With that, he jabbed my left arm with the needle, and we were done. 

On my way out of the office, I considered saying that I might try deep-dipping a small chicken by way of a test run. But, lest he think I wasn’t brave, I let that go. “Have a nice Thanksgiving,” I said. “You can always fry next year. You’ll survive your sister’s bird.”

“Thanks,” he said with a burst of laughter. “Have a nice day.”

Ah, tradition.

Do you wander around with a song in your head?  Do you wake up in the middle of the night because your hippocampus offers up mood music appropriate for what you have been doing during the day? 

In the last few weeks, as a singer with the Choral Society of the Hamptons, I have been learning some swell music by three illustrious Baroque composers — Purcell, Bach, and Handel — for the society’s holiday concert on Dec. 9. We’ll also perform Hallelujah from Messiah, and lead the concertgoers in carols. But none of that excellent music comes forth in the middle of the night, while I am tucked up in bed. Instead, what I hear, to my dismay — and to the tickled funny bone of a colleague who I just told this story to — is “My Melancholy Baby.”

Now there’s nothing wrong with an old ditty. “My Melancholy Baby” was written in 1912, and you can hear versions by such greats as Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, and Frank Sinatra on YouTube, if you like. But I hadn’t heard it in years, or even decades, before it started playing in my head while I was trying to sleep. The music and words reverberate:

“Come to me, my melancholy baby 

Cuddle up and don’t be blue 

All your fears are foolish fancy, maybe 

You know, dear, that I’m in love with you  

Every cloud must have a silver lining 

Wait until the sun shines through 

Smile, my honey dear

While I kiss away each tear 

Or else I shall be melancholy, too”

 I have begun to think I might have inherited this midnight-ditty syndrome from my father, who had a proclivity for catchy and somewhat silly melodies and would burst into totally surprising song at the most unexpected moments: “Yes, We Have No Bananas” while making toast or “By the Light of the Silvery Moon” on a city street corner.

Before I got married for the second time, I was somewhat worried about what my father and my new husband would think of each other when I introduced them, coming as they did from such different worlds, but before they had been in the same room for five minutes, they launched into a duet: “You Are My Sunshine.” I guess it was inevitable they would both start crooning: Chris, like me, is a singer from way back; his taste is primarily for the classical, but, like my father, he also takes delight in comic tunes.

It would have been nice if the first time they sang together they had chosen something a little more interesting than “You Are My Sunshine,” but I guess there wasn’t much overlap in their repertoire. Chris, an Ivy League preppie if ever there was one, probably wasn’t familiar with, for example, “The Trail of the Lonesome Pine,” one of my father’s favorite Laurel and Hardy gag tunes, which is about a cow “in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginny” who “stood on a railroad track” and got hit by the train, “smack!” By the same token, my father probably hadn’t committed to memory Chris’s favorite ridiculous numbers, which include a commercial jingle about a cereal called “Shredded Ralston,” which he sings in harmony with his sister when opportunity arises, or a crazy (and, if I am remembering correctly, extremely un-P.C.) one about bologna sung to the tune of “Pop Goes the Weasel.”

In any case, I hope I can chase “Melancholy Baby” away from my brain’s auto-repeat and replace it with one of the fine traditional carols we’ll be singing with the audience on Dec. 9, during the holiday concert. Tickets are still available at the Choral Society’s website, should your music taste be more refined than “I Never Saw a Purple Cow and I Never Hope to See One.”

I was only joking when I said, “Why not Thanksgiving?” when my first cousin, who’s been after us for years to come down to the Eastern Shore, asked when we’d like to visit. I figured she would laugh it off and say, “Aren’t you the wry one?”

Instead, she welcomed the idea, freeing us from playing host to two score or so, as we usually do. I say “we.” It’s actually Mary upon whom the weight of intensive festive mass gatherings lands. When I said proudly during a Thanksgiving past that I had “helped,” Kitty, Mary’s older sister, almost choked on her torte as she repeated, mockingly, “You HELPED. . . ?”

I was duly chastised at the time, though, as we know, time is a great healer. Soon I’d forgotten all about her rudeness and have been helping myself to more helpings ever since. 

Come to think of it, Kitty didn’t almost choke on her torte, for while she makes all the killer desserts for these occasions, the aforementioned torte, and apple and  pumpkin and pecan pies to boot, she doesn’t eat them. That chore is left largely to me, and I can say with no little pride that I’ve invariably risen to the occasion these many years, with virtually no help at all. None. 

I’m  waiting for the young to step up so that I can, in humble acknowledgment of the cyclic nature of things, pass the baton, but they’ve apparently been programmed to “eat healthy.” It’s amused me that I’ve lived so long despite having eaten in my youth, and in gargantuan portions, liverwurst, Lebanon bologna, pastrami, with extra fat, calves’ liver, scrapple, bacon, French fries, and cheeseburgers, most of it lathered with Hellmann’s mayonnaise, not to mention brown cows, rice pudding, floating islands, apple crisp, hard sauce, and vats and vats of Isaly’s ice cream, pistachio being my favorite.

Thanks to Mary, my diet is healthier now. Why, I’ve eaten so much kale in recent years that my father would be hard pressed, I think, to say, as he once did, that I needed more iron in my soul.

I still can’t get over it that Margot wants us to come for Thanksgiving. She’s a Christian martyr. And I know how I can really help. I’ll make Kitty’s torte.

Last year at this time we were preparing to host Thanksgiving for 37. It was our first Thanksgiving at the Mashomack Preserve and we wanted to make it a holiday to remember. Family, friends, food, and fire, all the hallmarks of, well, a Hallmark Thanksgiving. 

It was the promise of this gathering that was largely responsible for my agreeing to make the move to a place where the directions might almost be “over the river and through the woods.” We had the historic manor house with a commercial kitchen for the cooking and a table long enough to accommodate everyone. Miles of trails, views of the water, bald eagles. What’s not to love about that? 

But I didn’t love it at first, even though I knew that I should. In selling the holiday weekend to family and friends, enticing them to travel over the sound and through the woods, I was also selling myself on the idea of what lay ahead for our family of four, of the wonders all around that I was still too homesick to appreciate.

We played games and did jigsaw puzzles, cooked and ate together, went hiking and clamming, and at the end of each night, we walked back across the big lawn to our house, all its unpacked boxes reminding us how much work there was to do before it felt like home. 

It took me more than a year to feel settled, and to be honestly thankful for the place I find myself in. There is something about the turning of the calendar, revisiting a holiday for a second time that gives you a chance to see how far you’ve come. 

So I am grateful this Thanksgiving to have finally found my bearings in a new home. I’m thankful for every small gesture of welcome from a new friend, for all the colors of the leaves at the beginning of November and the ones still hanging on this week, for ferry rides on sunny mornings when I get a spot on the east side of the boat, for seeing the water every single day, for foxes and eagles and hummingbirds and red-tailed hawks, for that summer evening we went clamming and then walked home to cook the clams on the grill, for the bat researchers who let us join them one night in the woods, for the veterans who came to Mashomack with the Strongpoint Theinert Foundation and left it with the best damn fire pit you’ve ever seen, for the privilege of living and raising my children in such a special spot, and for the chance to share it with the people I love.

Carissa Katz is The Star’s managing editor. She lives at the Nature Conservancy’s Mashomack Preserve on Shelter Island, where her husband, Jeremy Samuelson, is the preserve director. 

Can you believe Thanksgiving is next week? It is a cliché to rhetorically ask where the time has gone, but this autumn, with the dramatic news cycle unfolding at such a breathless pace, it is flying by faster than ever. Don’t you agree?

For me, Thanksgiving is the year’s biggest holiday. Christmas just isn’t as important to me, despite the fun I share with grandchildren. I didn’t celebrate it when I was young and had to catch up as an adult. (The first Christmas presents I ever wrapped, in East Hampton before I was married, were elaborate constructions of paper and ribbons and cards and decorative detailing. Back then, there was plenty of time.)

Over the years, the number of people at our Thanksgiving feast has fluctuated wildly, from the Novembers when we regularly welcomed upward of 30 friends and relations (and the occasional stranger) to eat turkey and ham off plates balanced on laps, down to gatherings of eight or 10 around a dining room table set with our good, old Copeland Spode. 

Nostalgia works in funny ways. I just looked at a small scar on my left thumb; it dates to the first Thanksgiving I spent as a Rattray. Ev and I were living then, in the early 1960s, in the house on Gardiner’s Bay that our son David lives in now, and my mother-in-law, Nettie Rattray, for whom my granddaughter is named, was the only guest. We thought a goose would be festive but apparently were not experienced enough to know how to cope with the quantity of boiling-hot rendered fat that a domestic goose releases when roasted. Hence the scar.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, Thanksgiving was a real bacchanal. We would put on some early Sinatra and Dorsey records (“Polkadots and Moonbeams,” and “East of the Sun, West of the Moon”) as the guests began to stream in the door. After dinner, we played charades or sang a bit drunkenly around the piano. Our regulars could be relied on to bring a favorite dish that became traditional, like my friend Joanne Grant’s unforgettable pumpkin mousse, which sometimes came cleanly out of the mold and sometimes didn’t, as we all stopped in the kitchen to watch breathlessly. Or my daughter’s take on her great-grandmother’s Chocolate Sundae Pie, an airy custard dessert so impossible to perfect it was only attempted twice a year. Or our must-have appetizer, Oysters Rattray, remembered with watering mouths by all who tasted it. 

Oysters Rattray is a cousin of Oysters Rockefeller, only better, at least in my opinion. Instead of spinach, we use sorrel, which at one time grew in our garden. (Later, we used to reliably find it at the Green Thumb in Water Mill, but — oddly, considering the self-consciously “gourmet” world we live in today, sorrel is harder to find these days.) The recipe also calls for shallots, dill, parsley, and celery, garlic, butter, breadcrumbs, and Pernod. Don’t forget the Pernod.

This year, with the dust not yet settled in a round-robin of house-selling and house-moving — boxes and brooms flying all over our old family house on Edwards Lane — Thanksgiving will be different. Two of my children, and their kids, are heading to points north (Vermont) and west (San Francisco), and we will have a smaller crowd than ever before. My third child is coming with his two kids. He is focusing on a recipe for Indian pudding. I hope to find sorrel for the oysters. Everyone promises that in 2019 we will revive the boisterous party of Thanksgivings past. Next year, on Edwards Lane . . .

There was a time when no one spoke of closing the East Hampton Town Airport. At a minimum, I believed that and would tell pilots so when they said the elimination of the airfield was the ultimate goal of the anti-noise faction. Whether or not I was wrong about my observation then, they are talking about it now.

In the 1990s, the struggle was over jets and what size could land there. The measure of pavement strength was a, if not the, big issue. This would determine how heavy an aircraft could be to safely use the airport, and, as a consequence, how loud operations would be. Joanne Pilgrim, who had the KHTO beat for many years, kept a chunk of Runway 4-22 on her desk, the best reportorial souvenir ever of anyone on the Star staff, in my opinion.

Also in the air in those days was a fear that allowing large jets would lead inevitably to scheduled commercial service. There was a credible allegation of a doctored airport layout plan, lawsuits, and endless hours of hearings. Then came the helicopters. 

They started arriving slowly at first. A few of the ultrawealthy would charter helicopters to get from the city to their houses in the Hamptons. At first they were almost a novelty not worth worrying about. But as Manhattan got richer, helicopter travel became more frequent, and companies sprang up to offer semi-scheduled flights from there to here and back again.

I believe Patricia Currie was the first person I know of who publicly suggested that East Hampton Airport should be closed if nothing else was successful in quieting the helicopters. She was, and is, among the most faithful airport critics, which, as a Noyac resident, really says something about how widespread the noise is.

In more recent years, callers from the pilots side would complain to me about something they had read, and I would tell them that they might not actually want to align themselves with the helicopter companies. It would take only three members of the town board to agree to close the airport, and while that did not seem immediately likely, it had become a possibility. Local aircraft owners would in a sense be the ultimate victims of the helicopter problem if it got too great and there were no other answer.

On Tuesday, I filled in for Chris Walsh covering a town board meeting at the Montauk Firehouse. When I got there, it already had been underway for a few minutes, and Pat Trunzo was at the podium. Mr. Trunzo, a builder and former town board member, has for a long time struggled with airport issues. He was a leader in the anti-expansion fight and has continued to press for safety improvements and reductions in noise, which seem nearly impossible as long as the town remains under the heavy thumb of the Federal Aviation Administration.

And so there he was, representing the Quiet Skies Coalition, denouncing the F.A.A.’s idea that shuffling helicopter routes around would spread the noise more equitably. If Washington would not give the three East End airports the right to impose curfews and ban loud aircraft, shutting down the bane of so many summer days on the South Fork was the only choice.

Members of the town board, while not outwardly agreeing, did not blanch at the mention of taking the land and using it for new, valuable purposes. What was once unthinkable has now become a real possibility, whether the pilots and helicopter companies want to believe it or not.

The Day of the Dead was lively and bright. The sun streamed through the trees in the early morning, and in the afternoon it was so warm that the tennis lesson to which I’d taken our granddaughter was held outside. I couldn’t recall a First of November being so gentle.

The next day, drizzly and drear, was more fitting for remembering; the treats of the night before having traditionally assured that those who showed up at the door would, in return for “soul cakes,” pray for the donors’ dead.

Filial piety is not such a bad thing in which to engage every now and then in these heedless days. I am partly an amalgam of four parents (make that five if you include Mary’s mother), all of whom did the best they could, and all of whom remain pretty vivid within. 

I can become crowded when all are speaking at once — two fathers conservative, though one more forgiving of human foibles, a mother more tender, though no one’s pushover, one lighthearted, yet steely . . . I hear all their voices. 

And I try not to misrepresent them when I’m writing, though I’ll allow, given my flippant bent, that I have. 

As a group I remember them too: the love they had for one another, beacons to us. It was the second time around in my mother and stepmother’s cases, the first time around in the case of my stepfather, the fifth time around in the case of my father, and all the marriages ended happily. 

Everything, as my stepmother, who was French, used to say, arranged itself. “Tout s’arrange.” 

Those words, I think, are the ones Mary and I most use when we discuss thorny problems. As well as “GOOOOD GOD!” An exclamation my stepfather, whose moral rectitude was practically infamous, would often spit forth. 

“Everyone does the best they can,” my father would often say, to wit, that we are all of us forgiven, and ought to forgive ourselves. 

I still think of my mother when I dry between my toes. And the Bible she gave me has only partly been read. I’ll get to it, I’ll get to it. 

She said once we were on different wavelengths, but waves can bend toward one another, can’t they?

It’s drizzly and drear, though the sun is streaming through the trees as I think of them.