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.

A Star headline on Oct. 11 warned, “The Tiny Springs Library Is In Peril.” The report said that the library and the Springs Historical Society, which operates it, were in all sorts of trouble, both organizational and financial. Word spread that the books on the second floor — some 6,000 of them — had had to be thrown away, rather than sold as intended. 

That was all the people of Springs needed to hear to be spurred to action: More than 100 residents rallied at an Oct. 14 meeting at the Presbyterian Church to set things to rights. 

Legal issues are being sorted out pro bono by a resident lawyer. It was announced that an electronic database would be established to document new books as well as the art and children’s books that had been saved, and that new board members, officers, and a secretary had been put in place. 

Within a couple of weeks, it was clear that Springs would not lose its library and that, indeed, the library would be joining the 21st century.

Have you ever been inside the Springs Library? It is the plainly handsome, modest shingled house opposite Ashawagh Hall that once belonged to Ambrose Parsons. It was willed to East Hampton Town by Elizabeth Parker Anderson in 1975, and it is on the state and national registers of historic places. 

Pretty much everything I know about the Springs Library comes to me via the newsletters I have received for years about the various doings there, courtesy of Heather Anderson, who gathered and compiled the information. Ms. Anderson has stepped down after 40 years as president and librarian of the society; it is unclear whether its new officers will decide it is worth the effort and expense to keep the newsletter going.        

For me, the newsletter has been of invariable interest and has provided unimpeachable evidence that community, and history-keeping, are alive and well in Springs. My fingers are crossed that the newsletter will have a future.

The library is staffed entirely by volunteers, and East Hampton Town maintains the building, which is said to be compromised structurally and to need serious attention.

The community is very lucky that the library is sustained by a $5,000 annual grant from the Hilaria and Alec Baldwin Foundation. The Baldwins’ grant has allowed the library to keep its library-card fee a nominal $15 — with a $25 fee for library and society membership — as well as to offer families all the other things (CDs and DVDs and puzzles) we have come to expect in libraries these days. While the library’s new supporters and officers seeks further donations, they have already done a great service for Springs in keeping the library open. Join me in saying, “Hooray!” And perhaps a check might not go amiss?

“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.

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.

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.

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. 

Does anyone know how many undocumented immigrants live in East Hampton? Southampton? The East End? Has anyone estimated whether, or to what extent, unskilled workers who find low-wage work among the wealthy here reduces the economic prospects of local, native-born residents?

Immigration policy is a conundrum that Congress has been unable to face. It became an incendiary topic with the rise of Donald Trump. There are millions of Americans who say his nationalistic credo speaks for them, that they seek to restore America to the country they knew in elementary school, and that they have not shared enough of the American dream. That’s not surprising since Mr. Trump’s popularity is said to be strongest among those who are economically and culturally threatened.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, an estimated 11.4 million unauthorized immigrants were in the United States as of January 2012. This fall, however, a study by Yale and M.I.T. estimated that there are more likely to be 22 million undocumented immigrants in the country. 

President Trump, who has debased the national debate about immigration, taking it to the lowest possible common denominator, rose to power at a time when more Mexican immigrants were leaving this country rather than arriving. No matter. Using invectives, he made it a campaign issue.

The term nativism goes back to the mid-19th century, when the Know Nothing party represented native-born Protestant Americans who were threatened by the arrival of German and Irish Catholic immigrants. The ethnic majority of the time feared their decline. Was the “melting pot” a figment of do gooders’ imaginations or was it just some propaganda with which the populace comforted itself? 

 (This week, as a “caravan” of Central American refugees from violent and poverty-stricken El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala continued to walk toward the United States, determined to stake a claim for a better life, it is possible that the Trump administration will take military action against them. But even if they are allowed to seek asylum, profound questions remain about their prospects and about what their children could look forward to once they make it here.)

One of the studies I Googled this week reports that only 6.2 percent of children of immigrants with less than a high school degree will graduate from college. This statistic is sobering. Not everyone needs a college degree to live well in this country, but it helps. The Department of Labor reports that the unemployment rate is highest among adults with less than a high school diploma and their weekly income is $520 in comparison to $712 for those with a diploma. Earning a bachelor’s degree brought in $1,173.

There is good news on the East End, however. The Organizacion Latino-Americana, which was founded in 2002 to help immigrants deal with issues of health, employment, and justice, is alive and well. It is under the direction of a vigorous executive director, Minerva Perez, but needs all the support it can get. You might give OLA a call if you are interested.