The leaves are for the most part down from the trees in East Hampton. They were late in falling, it seems, though I was not watching the calendar all that closely. 

But I think fall turned, twisted, and curled on the stem and lingered in the air much longer than usual. No fall storms to speak of came through to tear them away. The mild temperature that lingered until it was at least Halloween held off the trees’ torpor.

The last of the leaves from the trees above the Star parking lot fell as if dumped from a truck over the weekend. The black cherry that in summer drops its fruit onto the cars released its yellow cargo all at once.

On Monday morning, early, before most of the staff had arrived, they were there, like a carpet of gold. A neighbor’s beech, still in faded copper, the only one left in gravity’s queue.

East Hampton Village has been quieter than normal this fall, the usual leaf blowers neither deployed as long nor as frequently as in the past. Fall’s slow fall has made for easier cleanup; the roar of the village’s vacuum truck past the windows less frequent. Across Main Street at Guild Hall, and at the library next door, the leaves seemed to have been dealt with swiftly and without much fuss. 

For the most part, I raked the office leaves myself. Already dried, like canvas sails left aloft in the harbor, they moved smartly in front of the metal tines. By the end of next week, they should all be gone. The village workers with the vacuum truck will make their last passes. The trees will be fully bare, their fractal limbs tracing like bloodlines against the sky.

There was a traffic jam on Tuesday morning on Main Street. A lone heron had found a happy roost on a Christmas tree stuck in the middle of Town Pond, and several drivers had stopped for a look.

I knew what was up in advance because my sister had phoned while I was getting a cup of coffee and left a voice message about a great blue heron atop the tree that has blue lights and that it would make the ultimate, if cheesy, Christmas photo for the cover of The Star.

By the time I got there about a half-hour later, Main Street was at a stop. Two people had pulled over on the James Lane side as well and were on the pond’s edge taking pictures with their phones.

When I got to the office and described the scene, Jane Bimson, one of our sales representatives and a good photographer, volunteered to get a photo. Taking a real camera with a lens that stood a chance of getting a decent shot, she headed out the door.

There have been plenty of herons around these days, it seems. The other morning, early, I had to slow my truck to give one that had been standing in the middle of Napeague Meadow Road a chance to rise and slowly fly off in a southerly direction, where a second heron launched itself from a tree and winged it off to do the same.

Earlier in the fall, a couple of people and I stood around in stunned awe looking across Folkstone Creek on Three Mile Harbor at several dozen herons that had paused to rest during migration. 

Herons have an interesting way of making a living, it seems to me. They are stone-cold killers, grim reapers of the swamps, whose strategy of stillness gives them an enigmatic air. Think of it: They stand for as long as it takes, knee-deep in water or amid a grassy meadow, then in an instant sweep down and grab a fish or other creature in their beaks.

At my friends Michael and John’s country place outside of San Francisco once, I watched a great blue hunting squirrels on the lawn. To my eastern eyes, accustomed to herons hunting fish, this seemed some kind of abomination. When I pointed it out, Michael told me they do it all the time.

 It’s hard to imagine that Town Pond, where the Christmas heron has taken up residence, has much for it to eat. A short flight away, Hook Pond is loaded with minnows, perch, and carp. Why this particular bird finds Town Pond appealing instead, I can’t say. Could be it’s bored and likes all the action. The view is fine, I’ll give it that. I hope it sticks around.

For some forgotten reason, I receive “1600Daily” emails, which come from the White House and offer a spin on the news that contrasts totally with that of the information sources I more regularly rely on.

According to Tuesday’s “1600Daily,” President Trump wants us Americans to know that we have already gotten an early Christmas present, thanks to recent Republican legislation: The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed on Monday at a record high (24,290), because traders were, the bulletin said, “buoyed by news from over the weekend that Republican senators had voted to pass sweeping tax-reform legislation.”

Another early Christmas present for which we should be happy, as noted by the same “1600Daily” broadside, was the announcement by President Trump, on a visit to Salt Lake City, that he was radically shrinking the boundaries of the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments, which are home to countless Native-American historic and archaeological sites. Only the “smallest area compatible with the proper care and management” of the archaeological treasures would be preserved; these public lands were being sacrificed in order to “increase economic growth and prosperity, especially in rural communities, by allowing grazing, commercial fishing, logging, and in some cases, mineral development.”

Thank you, Santa! 

For some reason, though, those grinches over at the Sierra Club just won’t get into the holiday spirit. “Trump’s order represents energy interests that wouldn’t hesitate to start logging, drilling, fracking, or mining in these treasured lands,” read a press release from the Sierra Club, which also quoted a spokesman for the Navajo Nation, who put it this way: “They want to go after coal. They want to go after petroleum, uranium, potash. They want to clear all the timber.” 

I guess I am a Scrooge-like ingrate, too, because I cannot muster any feelings of thankfulness for the gift of commercial exploitation of our national monuments. I still love my country, and especially its wild places and wide-open spaces: “I love thy rocks and rills/Thy woods and templed hills,” as we used to sing in “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” back in elementary school.

I have been making my own lists, and checking them twice, and have been pondering what sort of Christmas present we should send to the jolly old man who occupies the White House. What do you think: a tax strike? Or another protest march?

First of all, I want to say thank you, Santa, and all your helpers for fanning out across the globe in these weeks leading up to Christmas to help keep the magic alive. It’s not easy being in so many places at once while also making your list and checking it twice. All those decked-out halls can get pretty noisy when the squeals of excited children are fueled by candy canes and sugar cookies. It’s enough to drive anyone to distraction.

The youngest children, and most ardent believers, can be reluctant to sit for a photo, and the older ones are growing ever more skeptical and less enchanted, doubting your very existence. There’s just a small window of time in which all the elements align and the little ones are filled with wonder and awe at the sight of you. 

It’s a tough racket, the Santa gig, so I don’t want to criticize, but I do have two basic pointers for those of you out there gallant enough to take on this job. 

It’s true that there are divergent opinions about some of the basics. Is Santa Claus a jolly old elf? And, if so, is he an unusually small man? Or is he an elf of human-size proportions? Or is he not an elf at all? While you ponder that one, let’s move on to what he knows and what he doesn’t. 

I think we can agree that he knows when you’ve been bad or good, but how exactly does he know? Does he have a crystal ball? Hidden cameras? Does he get texts from your parents? And if he knows when you’ve been sleeping and when you’re awake, shouldn’t he also know your name? I mean, it makes sense that he should know your name if he knows all those other things. 

So we arrive at tip number one: The real Santa knows the names of the children who visit him to tell him what they’d like for Christmas. The real Santa, and his helpers too, should probably not begin the conversation by asking a child’s name. 

And if he hasn’t been paying close enough attention to pick up the name during regular surveillance, does it really matter that Johnny stole his sister’s candy cane or Jill snuck some extra doughnuts to eat in bed after her parents tucked her in or Annie took their old iPhone to school without asking them? I’d argue it does, so let’s just get the names straight or find a way avoid the subject. 

Another tip, and this one comes from personal experience: While in full dress, Santa should not ask parents if they know who he is. And when they respond in the only prudent way, “You’re Santa,” he should not then press them to guess again and reveal his alternate identity while posing for a picture with their child. 

“Who’s Bob?” (I’m changing the name to protect the guilty.)

“Well, honey, Bob is one of Santa’s helpers, but don’t worry, he’ll get your list to Santa.” 

It’s a tangled web we parents weave at this time of year; we could all use a little magic to keep from getting caught in it. 

Carissa Katz is The Star’s managing editor.

There were no deer fences in sight on the farmland in Northern Delaware, where I was visiting one of the kids at school last weekend. I noticed this as I drove along back roads near Middletown and miles of corn and soybeans. There were no ticks, either, according to several people I talked with.

Linking ticks to deer is heresy among some people here. Similarly, just pointing out that the thick and healthy woodland understory of past decades is now gone, and that deer are probably responsible, can been taken as fighting words. 

At the Middletown Wal-Mart early Saturday morning, where I had gone for a phone charger, I noticed tree stands and big bags of bait corn piled in an aisle. Three men in camouflage loaded a stand into a shopping cart. At the checkout, a couple placed two bags of corn onto the conveyor belt and then got into a conversation with the sales associate about how hunting was going.

Friends who have lived in less, shall we say, suburban parts of the world are often amused by the anti-hunting fervor that answers any public discussion about culling East Hampton’s deer. Up north, they say, there’s no question about what to do. 

Deer have no natural predators here, unless you count the cars that take out at least one every night. We have become used to the morning carnage. I notice that my children no longer seem to notice when we pass a fresh carcass at the side of the road, they, like the adults, have become numb to what once was a disturbing sight. Down in Delaware, you rarely see road kill.

People can argue about the deer population, but there is no question that there are a hell of a lot more of them in East Hampton than when I was younger. Back in the 1970s and ’80s we could go weeks without seeing one; now I might count more than a dozen on an evening ride home between East Hampton and Amagansett.

Time was that North Haven was the only place on the South Fork experiencing a deer explosion. Those who have lived here long enough might remember that village’s vigorous debates about whether to allow the use of a pesticide application station. East Hamptoners went convulsive over a recent village sterilization experiment. Neither worked to reduce the herds to a noticeable degree.

A number of the candidates running for town office this season have been brave enough to say that hunting has to be part of the deer-management program for East Hampton Town. They are correct. It is simply inhumane to continue to allow cars to be just about the deer’s only limiting factor.

Recently, I listened for eight of 11 waking hours, sitting in on a Killer Bee reunion on a Friday night and, the following morning, attending an equally long Hall of Fame induction ceremony at East Hampton High School. 

It was, I thought, a new world record for me. I’ve had a long love affair with my own voice, beginning in grade school when I first began to wave my hands wildly whenever questions were posed — at least in English, history, religion, and foreign language classes. “Teacher, teacher!”

Perhaps that is why I became a journalist, sensing I needed to balance out a proclivity to proselytize and to blurt out answers with some attentiveness to others.

(Speaking of proselytizing, I wonder why it is that this paper has included it among its epistolary no-nos, along with libel, obscenity, and nonexclusivity. Aren’t just about all letter writers proselytizing, inasmuch as they’re trying to persuade others to their point of view?)

You’ll notice that in regard to hand-waving I left out math. I tried to blend in with the woodwork in math class. In math it was the silence of the hams. Begin talking about train A and train B even to this day and I throw up my hands, not as an importunate show-off, but as someone about to be assailed by a swarm of yellow jackets, which actually happened recently and was not pleasant. 

Knowing something more than math’s basics (I can figure out tips in my head and slice budgetary pies with a reasonable degree of accuracy) ought to be on my bucket list, for I do believe in self-improvement, but while I know my days are numbered, I’ll probably go to my grave innumerate. I know math has its delights. In the next lifetime perhaps.

Back to paying attention to others, I’m glad when it comes to the above-cited cases that I did, even though the sessions lasted four hours each. It wasn’t as if I were at a town bored meeting or attending a political forum; however, the Killer Bee alums’ reunion, though born of criticism having to do with the recently premiered “Killer Bees” documentary film, and the Hall of Fame ceremonies were joyous occasions. 

And joy — at least when I’m thinking straight and simply listening — is what it’s all about.

Thirty-eight members of the Cory family, if you count spouses who may or may not use that surname, arrived at a Pennsylvania resort at different times from different places in the country for a reunion last weekend — and what an event it was.

Here’s how we got to 38. Five siblings in the oldest generation came with five spouses. They accounted for nine kids, now adults or young adults as the case may be, and they came with seven spouses and brought 12 children, if you count one who attended on Facetime and another in utero.

The Shawnee Inn and Golf Resort is on the Delaware River in the Poconos, near the 70,000-acre Delaware Water Gap recreational area. The landscape is beautiful. A golf resort would seem an unlikely place for this generation of Corys, and indeed not one went onto the links. But the resort was large enough so we could be provided with a banquet room of our own to congre­gate in, look at memorabilia, watch slide-show images of old and new family photos, have one dinner by ourselves, and even do a little yoga.

With so many who had not seen each other in a long time, there was a lot to hear about:  Bob and Joe’s new house, Josh’s new job, Daniel’s new school, Ezra’s first days in college, Rebecca’s role in “The Nutcracker,” that sort of thing. Accomplishments were noted and praised. The memorabilia and scrapbooks were carefully perused, and old documents read.

The Shawnee Inn is huge. In addition to the 27-hole golf course, it has a restaurant, a café, a brewery, two brew pubs, a spa and salon offering treatments galore, and a wide, old-fashioned veranda lined with wood and wicker rocking chairs. The weather was sunny, perfect for relaxing there or taking walks on the many trails. Two outdoor weddings — not Cory relations — took place on Saturday, and some of us stole a peek. Others enjoyed the great big swimming pool, but too busy catching up with each other, none took the resort up on its river or waterfall trips.

As for me, the youngest generation drew lots of my attention, and I quickly learned all their names. I had recently seen the littlest — who is not quite 1 and not quite walking — and was pleased that she was wearing a dress I had given her. I enjoyed watching cousins make friends, a girl who just turned 10 and a 13-year-old boy, for example. 

On the afternoon most of us departed, the Corys, and it seemed to be every last one, engaged in a hug-a-thon, children included, creating an almost impenetrable mass in the hotel lobby. Electronic devices, which for the most part had been set aside, appeared for last-minute photos, with lots of bing-ing and pinging. 

I am sure that everyone will long remember the comfort they found in simple togetherness. We were a group of privileged Americans, to be sure, but there would be plenty of time when we got home to face, and do whatever we could about, the grim inequities of the world we live in.

I only realized later what had happened. On my way to drop Ellis off at second grade, I decided to stop quickly to vote. Election District 12, where I was registered, never has all that much of a line, so I figured we would be in and out of the Amagansett Firehouse quickly.

At the E.D. 12 table, however, I was told that my name did not appear on the roll. I could fill out an affidavit ballot instead, if I wanted. My immediate thought was that the Russians were messing around in United States election databases and had penetrated the Suffolk County Board of Elections. I mentioned this to one of the poll watchers. “Maybe so,” he said.

We are living through an odd time, with my first instinct doubt about the validity of the election. Score one, Vladimir Putin, I guess. 

At the table where I filled out my affidavit, another poll worker said there had been about five people already that morning with some kind of registration snag. I began to feel nervous. Could something really be happening here? 

A third poll worker tried to look me up on the New York State Board of Elections website. Nothing. He looked himself up. Nothing. He looked alarmed. The second poll worker announced that they probably should phone someone. 

After all of this, Ellis was a half-hour late, though with his “I voted” sticker on his down vest, he was happy enough. 

At work, I had a look online at my registration details, which I found associated with my work address instead of my home address. Having been booted from my box by the Amagansett postmaster this summer for not picking up my mail frequently enough, something to that effect must have been sent to the board of elections, and someone there decided I had moved and made the change unbidden. 

Rather than head back to Amagansett and try to withdraw my affidavit ballot, and then vote in East Hampton while later correcting my registration to show the accurate address, I opted to let things be. I just hope that my lonely ballot, stuffed in its sealed envelope, gets counted. 

At the very least, Ellis got his sticker.

The time has come for us to get a dog. I’ve had many over the years, and a rescue dog is now in order. The problem is the difference between our perceptions of what would be a perfect pet and the perceptions of the highly meticulous staff at the Animal Rescue Fund of the Hamptons as they size us up.

To be sure, some would call us elderly and might therefore be suspicious of our ability to care for a dog. I bristle, of course, when I hear myself described that way and point out that elderly is a changeable concept. 

(Who is “elderly”? The I.R.S. has a program called Counseling for the Elderly that provides free tax advice to, get this, anyone 60 or older. Is 60 elderly? I recently found a perfect takedown of the word in a report from NPR. It quotes the executive editor of The Washington Post in 1956 telling his staff, “A lot of us old folks in our 50s do not like to be called elderly. When you are a great deal older than you are now, you will discover that the time a man becomes elderly is exactly like the place where the Earth and sky meet.”)

But back to dogs.

We have been visiting ARF on and off  for nearly two years now, in our hunt for just the right pet. In the last few weeks we have gotten charged up about the prospects of taking home a dog displaced by one of this season’s bad hurricanes, but we’ve not gotten very far. Don’t get me wrong, the people who work at ARF are helpful and patient, but we keep missing out. More than once we have arrived hoping to meet a dog we saw on the ARF website, only to learn it was out of town at an UpIsland event. Another time, a dog we were absolutely sure we would love already had been adopted. We have asked about others whose pictures and descriptions are in a big loose-leaf book on ARF’s front counter, but have been told they were too energetic or too big for the likes of us.   

We don’t want a puppy, but would prefer a calm adult dog, possibly even an older dog that others might not be drawn to. (Just don’t call it “elderly.”)

Things have changed a lot since a dog named Goodie, which ARF called a Lab mix, as I recall, came to work with me at The Star. In my opinion, she was a real Bonac dog, exactly like the dogs you would see in the back of a green pickup truck hereabouts once upon a time. We didn’t have as much off-season traffic on Main Street in those days, some 20 years ago now, and Goodie would come and go as she pleased. I had to put a stop to that, however, after someone called one day asking if the dog lounging on the sidewalk in front of Guild Hall belonged to me. Goodie was heir to the kingdom once ruled over by another ARF dog belonging to my daughter, a magnificent giant named Mookie. 

Goodie and Mookie were the only dogs, in their day, who worked at The Star, while today there is apt to be as many as three or four hanging around the editorial offices. 

The good news is that new dogs arrive at ARF all the time. Canines displaced by natural disasters have been nurtured there recently, as I mentioned, and some seem to be continually arriving from puppy mills or kill shelters. ARF was expecting 18 just last Sunday. I am sure there will be one for us there before long.

I’ve celebrated Thanksgiving for only about half of my life, as I moved to America some 25 years ago. But already I’ve decided that, like Christmas, Thanksgiving is nothing more than a set of repeats: Its uniqueness is its groundhog nature. Same food, same faces, same tablecloth, same fancy china.

The only thing that breaks the predictability is that if you happen to be a parent, which I am, you get to watch with each passing year the metamorphosis of your offspring, from minor to major. 

My son is 17, on the cusp of going off to college and then who knows what. He and I are close. Well, as close as anyone can be to a teenager. It comes and goes, like cell reception in Northwest Woods. Sometimes I hear his deep, comforting voice, and other times it’s just static and snatches of some indecipherable language. 

As I watched him at the Thanksgiving table, his long limbs spilling around him, chatting effortlessly despite being the only person under 35, I realized that all the received wisdom about teens, about the talking back and the mess, the sulking and the door slamming, is mostly just sitcom clichés. I’m actually pretty astonished at how good humans are at getting through the chrysalis stage.

And that’s the other thing about these festive holidays: Each and every year you get sucker-punched by sentiment. That ability only a select handful of days have to repeatedly overwhelm all sense of judgment and intellect. So by the time the meringue and pumpkin pies, the ice cream and the sweets made it to the table, I was already as wobbly as the cranberry jelly, on the verge of dampening the whole festive thing.

In my lachrymose state, I realized that one of the biggest lessons about being a parent is that until you become one you have no idea of what love is, or like, or even what it’s there for. That urgent, delicious loin-warming feeling that you had understood to be love was really only something to be prefaced with “making” — it’s the tease, the amuse-bouche, the glimpse, a warm bath compared to the riptide of the real thing that arrives with parenthood. Up until then you’ve just been paddling in love. Growing up, nobody ever tells you this, parents never explain this fact to you — that one day you won’t be able to feel the bottom of your loving, that you’ll drown in the stuff.

Parents don’t tell their children this, of course, because by the time they’re adolescents or teenagers, to try to explain the depths of that terrifyingly transcendent fundamental act of nature that is loving your child is too difficult and choking. Most likely if I tried right now, my son would curl up into a skinny, athletic-clothing ball of hellish embarrassment, arms scything the air.

The funny and sad thing is that the time when it’s easiest to express these feelings, when there is the least emotional resistance between parent and child, when all that love is most obvious and free flowing, is the one time your child will never remember. Those first years when he couldn’t blow his own nose, when you picked him up and rocked him and watched him speechlessly as he slept, are simply blank. 

Later, as a child grows up, the relationship is muddied with practicality, with life’s lessons and mistakes, with the dull rigmarole of discipline and bedtimes and homework, inappropriate behavior, soccer games, and tiredness. And that’s the part a child remembers of his childhood. He’ll remember dodging through it. But there were four scant years when all he was immersed in was an ocean of love, and even though we parents will never forget it, a child remembers none of it.

I’ve decided the greatest design flaw of human beings is that we don’t remember our childhoods and can’t recall the moment we uttered our first words or took our first steps, the first time we tasted chocolate or fell asleep on a father’s shoulders. My son doesn’t remember these things. He won’t until well into the future, someday when perhaps he’s a parent, and then, sitting around a Thanksgiving table surrounded by faces and food so familiar that you come to realize they are only there for the transmission of memory and remembrance, it will all come to him.

Judy D’Mello is a reporter at The Star.