It’s a few days before Christmas and I should wrap up my thoughts for Mary, with whom I share daily bread and whose company I always look forward to, as does O’en.

We are the two of us smitten, and I always say to him on the way home that we’re drawing near to her. That perks him up. Me too. 

Pretty much all the accoutrements of the season have vanished, now that the kids are gone, though there was, until it fell off, a nice wreath on our door, and now a small tree, a real one in a bucket, sent by Sheila from Southern California, which reminded me that Christmas is celebrated to the nines in the desert.

There was a time, wasn’t there, when an orange or a persimmon or some sweetmeat for the children would do, but it’s all out of proportion now. Surfeit’s the order of the day. I really don’t envy the young all those things.

Perhaps prompted by such contrarian thoughts, we’ve begun divesting ourselves lately of things, thinking, as we sort through all the stuff, what it is we want to save. 

I want to save us, as we are at our ease, talking lightheartedly across the table, about any manner of things — things of the mind, mind, not of things you can stub your toes on.

“I did get you something,” she wrote me once, “but I didn’t have time to tell you my thoughts before they were wrapped. . . . We are the changing seasons. . . .”

Deep transience, I’m thinking.

When at our best, I mean, when not wrenched from the present — her presence being enough of a present for me, she who is beautiful, witty, and true. 

Could you wrap that thought up, please? Yes, with that shiny red paper and white ribbon. I’ll put it under the tree. 

It’s for someone whose days, I hope, will always be merry and bright, though I should add her Christmases needn’t be white.

“Oh yeah, oh yeah / Oh yeah, oh yeah / Imagine. . . .” All the way back in 1963, John Lennon exhorted us to imagine. I’d heard the song — “I’ll Get You,” the B side to “She Loves You” — perhaps a thousand times, but never the way I heard it on Saturday, standing in the subfreezing air with hundreds of others, all of us forming an ever-thickening circle surrounding the mosaic at Strawberry Fields, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. 

Outside of that tiny section of Central Park, people went about their business, that business apparently the holiday-season orgy of materialism or the enthusiastic annihilation of livers and brain cells, Saturday being the annual SantaCon, an event that the late, great Village Voice once described as “a day-long spectacle of public inebriation somewhere between a low-rent Mardi Gras and a drunken fraternity party.” 

Around that mosaic, though, those hundreds, several of them wielding guitars and a handful of other instruments, were remembering Lennon on the 38th anniversary of his murder. The songs flowed, one after the other, one guitarist or another strumming or singing an introduction in an informal, festive sing-along and celebration of Lennon and the Beatles. 

It’s always so nice to see people of all ages and ethnicities come together, forming a sort of microcosmic New York City within the city, a microcosm of humanity itself, in its collective impulses to gather together and express itself. Better still when the expression is uplifting and positive. All you need is love, love is all you need, was Lennon’s message to the world in 1967. I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together, he intuited, later that year, with a little help from lysergic acid diethylamide. 

And yet, despite the merry chorus of New Yorkers and visitors to the Capital of the World, where Lennon had persevered, over the strenuous and paranoid protestation of Richard Nixon and his ilk, to become a permanent resident of the city he loved, an overwhelming sadness would not, could not fade away. 

George Harrison, said his widow, Olivia, “was really angry that John didn’t have a chance to leave his body in a better way, because George put so much emphasis and importance on the moment of death, of leaving your body.” 

Lennon was not afforded the luxury of calmly going into the blinding, burning light, mindful that his and the universal mind are one. How could he, with a fan/fanatic squeezing a trigger over and over, shooting holes in his body? 

Nineteen years after Lennon’s murder, the nation was shocked by a mass shooting at a high school in Colorado, two students murdering 12 schoolmates and a teacher. And then, the trickle became a deluge, among the carnage 20 first graders and six adults in Connecticut; 49 killed and 53 wounded inside a nightclub in Orlando, and 58 killed and 851 injured — you read that right — from gunfire and the resulting panic when a gunman opened fire on the crowd at an outdoor country music concert in Las Vegas. 

This year has been a predictably bloody one in the gun-crazy United States of America. Seventeen more students and teachers were killed, on Valentine’s Day, at a high school in Parkland, Fla. It was the year’s deadliest mass shooting — as of Monday, anyway — but far from the only one. On the 311th day of the year, the 307th mass shooting took place, this time inside a crowded bar in Thousand Oaks, Calif. Twelve were killed — 13 if you count the shooter, who turned the weapon on himself in the end. 

In a sad but sadly foreseeable irony, some of the patrons enjoying country music at the Borderline Bar and Grill in Thousand Oaks had survived the mass shooting in Las Vegas one year before. There are now Americans who have personally experienced two mass shootings. 

According to the John Lennon Official account on Instagram, more than 1.4 million people have been killed by guns in the United States since Lennon was shot and killed on Dec. 8, 1980. Is this who we are? Is this who we want to be? Will we passively bury the bodies, offer our eminently useless thoughts and prayers, and await the next shooting, surely knowing by now that nowhere is safe?

Saturday was so very cold in the park, and I left, after an hour, with Lennon’s words rising from the crowd and into the wintry air. “A very merry Christmas, and a happy New Year / Let’s hope it’s a good one, without any fear.” 

Christopher Walsh is a senior writer at The Star.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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 . . .

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.

Doormats. They are something that serve two purposes — to clean off the bottoms of shoes before they step into the house and to dress up your entryway and give visitors a sense of your style. That all sounds great, but I’ve yet to find one that is long-lasting and worth the pretty penny they cost. 

We bought our house a few years back and I’ve gone through my fair share of doormats. One made of rubber, ones made of coco fiber, ones made of cloth especially for covered porches. Plain or decorative, it doesn’t seem to matter. They break down. They flake. They fade. Always in a matter of months, it seems.   

I’ve bought cheap and I’ve bought the not-so-cheap. I wouldn’t say I’ve bought the ultra expensive . . . yet. I’m not afraid to buy high end if it’s high quality and worth it. But I’ve yet to meet anyone who gives a glowing review of any doormat and so I’ve wavered on making the purchase. 

I’ve shopped in our local hardware stores and online. There are quite literally thousands available online. Google whatever your heart’s desire is and you will find something. But will it be worth the buck you spend on it? That’s the question. 

It dawned on me recently that perhaps my expectations are too high. Perhaps they are not supposed to last long at all. I don’t know what gave me the idea that something that costs $50 to $100 should last longer than a few months. Silly me. Surely there are many other things that I could throw money at in my house. 

Perhaps I should be rotating them out each season. Lord knows they make ones for winter, spring, summer, and fall. I discovered there are even specialty mats for snow and ice melting. 

I know there are more important things to worry about than this, but if anyone has a recommendation out there, please, by all means, drop me a line. I just want a simple doormat to greet guests at they enter my home, one that doesn’t break the bank and lasts longer than the blink of an eye. 

Taylor K. Vecsey is The Star’s deputy managing editor.

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.