I’m a little tired of this — propping up the economy every year when it comes to Christmastime. I read in the papers where we must keep spending to keep ourselves out of yet another recession, and I’m doing my part, but it’s becoming burdensome. I can’t do it all alone.

    “Never again should we take a vacation early in December,” Mary said on our return recently from a week in Palm Springs. She was talking about walking underdressed into winter, and, initially, I’ll admit, it was a shock to go all of a sudden from the 70s and 80s to the 40s and 30s, but we’re acclimated now. In fact, I’d say it’s almost balmy as of this writing.

    While her thoughts were weather-related during that dawn takeoff — the only time during our stay I’d seen the burnt radiance of the desert sunrise over the backlit mountains, as compelling, by the way, as our sunsets at Three Mile Harbor — mine tended toward the agony of the holiday that awaited. Christmas will be upon us with all the vengeance of Superstorm Sandy, I thought.

    We had for a week somehow sluffed off the weight of obligations, and it had been wonderful. But, on our return, as I said, Christmas in all its enormity loomed.

    The Rubicon has been long crossed, nothing can be done. “Don’t, whatever you do, feel obligated in any way whatsoever,” we say to each other — out of a sense of obligation, before being tossed about once again by the season’s storm surge of social, economic, and psychic imperatives.

    Yet, once it’s all over, boredom and ennui, wonderful boredom and ennui, ensue — at least until Memorial Day, by which time, I hope, our credit card gods — and yours too, I say, with hearty good cheer — are fully appeased.

    Boredom and ennui . . . ah, the true tidings of comfort and joy.

   It was family day at East Hampton Bowl, though I didn’t know it at first on Sunday as I took our 8-year-old daughter there mid-afternoon just to get out of the house.

    Evvy and I had tried and failed to go bowling a week earlier, but had arrived after what apparently was a surprisingly early closing time; maybe it was just dark inside, but the lack of vehicles in the parking lot made it seem uninviting.

    Anyway this time, it was family day, we were told by the nice woman at the desk. We could bowl for an hour, and as many games as we liked within that time, for $35, shoes included. Almost all the lanes were filled, most with what appeared to be parents and young children. We were set up in lane six, next to a couple with a boy and a girl who looked about 6 and 9.

    Evvy and I got on our shoes, squared away the scoring, and started to bowl. Then we noticed the music. Top-40 pop was blasting from the speakers, no surprise there. But then, as we listened, we realized that the playlist was not, shall I say, family-friendly.

    At home, my wife, Lisa, and I have been trying to enforce a no-cursing rule. I was cured of sailor-mouth to some degree by the kids’ imposing a $10-per-bad-word fine, which paid them considerable dividends, I am chagrined to admit. Over time, however, it worked. I cut back, reducing my use of profanity even around the Star office.

    Lisa, who wanted no part of the deal, continued her merry ways. But now that our youngest, Ellis, is about to turn 3 and rapidly expanding his vocabulary, we have renewed our clean-up efforts. A foul word in his presence by anyone will result in that person suffering a 24-hour ban on the use of personal electronic devices, such as iPhones and laptop computers.

    So Evvy and I were shocked and stared at each other silently at the first four-letter word to roll from the bowling alley’s speakers. Then there was another. And another. I wasn’t keeping close count, but heard a couple of F-bombs, several N-words, and one or two S-drops.

    I couldn’t tell if any of the other adults in the place were listening. On family day, I guess, you just have to tune it all out.

   In my mother-in-law’s house are two large black-and-white photos prominently displayed, of Secretariat with Ron Turcotte aboard, leaving their four 1973 Belmont Stakes competitors in the dust, 31 lengths behind, and of Jackie Robinson stealing home on Yogi Berra and Whitey Ford in the opening game of the 1955 World Series between the Yankees and the Dodgers.

    She’s had them there ever since I can remember, and they’ve become all the more important to me as I think of her who died at Southampton Hospital early this morning, leaving the four children who had held her hands the last few days, way behind.

    It’s not dying that hurts, it’s living, says Emily Dickinson.

    These children, one of whom is my wife, are the birds that stay. And her mother, who had said, unafraid, “it’s the end of the game” when told the morphine drip she’d wanted was on its way, has, after having danced off third, stolen home.

    Only one thing worried her about me, that I tended to hunch, foreshadowing, I suppose, for her a full-circle return to the fetal position. I’ve been mindful therefore in the past few days that I should keep my chin up and my shoulders back. “Don’t hunch,” I hear her voice saying in my head. “Don’t hunch.”

    And so, trying not to hunch, I walked into the milky lights of Herrick Park the other night, after the morphine came, and stepped out onto the chalked line and ran twice around.

    Though I knew she had been a militant atheist, I told her on heading back to the car that I was accepting her as my personal trainer.

    Emily Dickinson also said that time did not assuage — if you really loved the one behind the door — though I have a hunch that the loving are, indeed, assuaged . . . that Mary Kernell, with all her keen intelligence, wry humor, and abiding love, lives, and will always live, in the birds who (for the moment) stay, until the pitying snows persuade their feathers home.

    In the name of the Bee — And of the Butterfly — And of the Breeze — Amen.

   About a week ago, a small parcel, postmarked San Juan, Puerto Rico, arrived at the office. Inside, cushioned against breaking, was an old glass bottle of the sort that might have once contained a soft drink.

    The legend, “J. D’Amico Quality Bottler,” in raised letters, appeared on one side, and “Amagansett, N.Y.” on the other. Vertical ribs made it reflect light in a colorful way. In the hand, its tapered midsection was vaguely reminiscent of the classic Mae West Coca-Cola bottle. The raised letters at bottom said it once contained seven fluid ounces.

    Rolled and tucked into its narrow neck was the following note, dated Jan. 2:

    “Hey Man!”

    “Found this bottle wedged in between two rocks on a beach in Belize. I’m traveling the Caribbean, photographing hotels and wealthy families on vacation. I am in P.R. now, on my way to Anguilla. Running out of paper so I’ll drop you a line when I return to N.Y.C. All my best! Chris. P.S.: Happy new year.”

    Chris, who sent me the bottle, is Chris Manis, a friend who is singularly the most adept finder of things I have ever known. Back in the 1990s, when I lived in the city, he was continually picking up loose cash from the sidewalk, a dropped earring, some interesting tool, or piece of furniture left in the trash. I asked him what his secret was. “I never look up,” he said.

    According to Carleton Kelsey’s “Amagansett: A Pictorial History, 1680-1940,” Joseph D’Amico ran a barbershop and ice cream parlor on the north side of Amagansett Main Street in the early part of the 20th century. An advertisement in a 1910 issue of this newspaper for the J. D’Amico Tonsorial Parlor noted that he stocked cigars, and canary birds and cages.

    Later, in 1932, an immigrant from Sicily, Salvatore LaCarrubba, bought the building, which had once been occupied by the Life-Saving Service, and opened a shoemaking and repair business. A few months later, LaCarrubba’s began selling clothes. From my cursory reading, I did not find out what became of Mr. D’Amico.

    It is difficult to imagine by what circumstances a bottle that may well have first been sold in an Amagansett shop ended up on a beach in Belize, some 1,800 miles away in a straight line. In those days, there was still a vigorous coastal trade, so it is possible that, after being carried to New England, it accompanied a shipment of salt cod or some other commodity on a long voyage south. Doubt I’ll ever know for sure.

   That the South Fork is part of the greater metropolitan area rather than the rural place we used to think it was has become almost impossible to deny. You get the message from conspicuous consumption, both in the size and shape of many new houses and in the boutiques that have turned East Hampton’s Main Street into Madison Avenue East. But you also get the message by simply taking note of all the millions of special events you can participate in on any given jam-packed weekend.

    Take Saturday, for example.

    I was surprised by the 26 activities listed in The Star’s Winter Holiday supplement for that one day. And, really, the figure should have been 27, because one of the events I attended — the Hamptons Take 2 Documentary Film Festival at the Bay Street Theatre — was missing from the list. Some 16 documentaries were shown at the Take 2 festival last weekend and, Saturday night, Susan Lacy, the founder and executive producer of the terrific PBS series “American Masters,” was honored at a reception and one of the films she has made, “Leonard Bernstein: Reaching for the Note,” was shown. I wouldn’t have missed it, even though we had spent the afternoon at Guild Hall for an HD screening of “La Clemenza di Tito” from the Metropolitan Opera.

    Our enriching Saturday selections meant that we had to skip another favorite event: one of Music for Montauk’s outstanding free concerts, this one by Freddie Bryant and the Melting Pot Jazz Sextet. We also couldn’t make it to that night’s screenings in the OLA Film Festival at the Parrish Art Museum, although we would have loved to.

    Talk about choice!

    Not only has our overall population ballooned, but so has every imaginable kind of pursuit, hobby, and entertainment — from farmers markets to road races, from public gardens to book clubs, from kids’ art lessons to baking classes. We no longer just have the original Hamptons International Film Festival and the HT2FF and OLA, we also now have an East End Black Film Festival, which had its seventh incarnation at the Parrish in November. (For two years we also had a Wildlife Conservation Film Festival here, although it seems to have given us up in favor of New York City, where it will take place in early 2013.)

    I’ve been amazed, and sometimes amused, by the way in which city folks always seem to maintain busier schedules — a hectic recreational, social, educational round — than the rest of us, even when they are supposedly out here to take it easy.

    I am pretty sure this is the case because many of the people we used to think of as city dwellers now spend as much or more time here “in the country” than they do in Manhattan. It’s not so much that they have moved to the country but that the country has been absorbed by the town. The only question that remains is why so many of them persist in wearing barn jackets and Wellington boots.

   The Edwards tradition of cutting a white pine from their own Northwest wood lots for a Christmas tree goes back to the time Christmas trees first became popular among East Hampton’s old-fashioned Presbyterians.

    And so it was in the 1960s and ’70s when we followed Jeannette Edwards Rattray, my mother-in-law, into the woods to get ours. She would also take home clumps of different mosses and winterberries, with their glossy leaves and small red berries, to build a miniature landscape scene in a big bowl: moss for grass, tiny wooden farm animals standing under the branches of the berry-laden  tree.  I don’t know if this was a local tradition or if it was a family invention, but I loved it, and for years would do the same thing, adding bits of other small plants or perhaps burying a pocket mirror (standing in for a pond) to complete the storybook tableau.    

    As might be expected, our forays into the woods weren’t always as full of holiday cheer as we might have liked. One or the other of the kids would object, strongly, to the tree the others wanted and make a fuss until we gave in and conceded to choosing another; then the process would be repeated until everyone was in a foul temper, stamping around under the green canopy, crunching deeper and deeper into the woods to find the perfect one. Our inability to come to agreement may be the reason why we always chose an extra, little tree for the children’s teddy bears. I still tell myself each December that I am going to have a bear tree, but I usually don’t.

    White pines are delicate. Their branches get dragged down by even moderately heavy ornaments, and the finished, fully ornamented and lighted product is, depending on your point of view, either a tree some woodland fairies might dance around or one you would expect to see on the Charlie Brown Christmas special. Sometimes the children’s friends would laugh at the sight.

    One Christmastime in the ’70s we had cut our tree and gathered everything up and were heading home on a road that was still paved in dirt and devoid of houses when a friend, who was buying and selling real estate at the time, came along in his own vehicle in the other direction. We were satisfied with our haul and feeling pretty merry.

    Ev rolled down the window of his big, green International Travelall truck.  “What are you doing in our woods?” he shouted, knowing our friend would take it as a joke. The friend’s two-word response was a loud, “Whose woods?” This answer had the ring of a portent — funny because it was already kind of true, then — so imagine how it resounds now, in retrospect?

     We don’t own any wood lots anymore, or any house lots in Northwest either, unfortunately. But I must confess that in recent years, we have held onto the tradition by surreptitiously finding places on public property or roadside byways that have overcrowded stands of white pines, cutting one, and scurrying away, hearts pounding.

    Frankly, I can’t believe I am admitting this in print. But I hope that if any of you readers catch us in the act, you will be forgiving, and let us go, if only for sentimentality’s sake.

   It may seem funny, but I sometimes think the nicest part of my day, at least on those days when I have to work, is the walk between the house and the office. The few moments it takes to stroll the 250 feet to or from The Star, absorbing whatever the weather is and looking at the sky, keep me happy.

    A similar feeling of joy in the outdoors occurred on Christmas Day when we went to spend time with my son David and his family in the house on Gardiner’s Bay where he and my other children grew up. Being out in the wild landscape — and the blustering wind — of Napeague lifts my spirits and, this week, reinforced the daydream I indulge in that someday much of the sandy and exotic land that surrounds the house will become a park.

    Perhaps we all were meant to live in the outdoors. Or maybe it’s just that being outdoors reminds me, personally, of the well-being I felt as a child on my grandparents’ 108-acre farm in the Catskills or as a college student during the summers I was a counselor at a summer camp, where we slept in lean-tos or teepees or under the shelter of a covered wagon. In any case, when our house on Napeague was finished in 1963, I embraced the rare landscape that surrounded it. The house was not just isolated, it was, in fact, one of the only houses in sight and the only one on our empty road that was lived in year-round.

    These days there are plenty of houses along Cranberry Hole Road, but, as far as I am concerned, it is still one of eastern Long Island’s last great places.

    I have saved part of a column that Larry Penny, The Star’s nature columnist, wrote in these pages some time ago about why Napeague is to be treasured. I am not sure that those who make decisions about how the Town of East Hampton uses its community preservation fund think often about Napeague, or the part of it called Promised Land, but here is some of what Mr. Penny had to say:

    “The water table is only a few feet below, and fresh groundwater continually wicks up to supply the bearberry and heather with enough water to keep them thriving. Trees don’t stand a chance, except for the pitch pines in little hollows, as the winds sweeping across from south to north in the summer and vice versa in the winter keep any from getting a toehold. This close-knit dune plain as far as I can tell is the only one of its kind in New York State, maybe in all of America.”

    Edible wild mushrooms and prickly pear cactus grow on Napeague. There are other rare plants, including lady slippers; cranberry bogs can be found off the road to the south, and wildlife, from toads to snakes to foxes. We have found huge old whale bones, over the years, in the dune craters between Cranberry Hole and Montauk Highway; it is easy to dig up arrowheads, too (although I won’t tell you where).

    If I could, I would gather botanists and zoologists, birders and expert environmentalists and ask them to draw a heavy line around the part of the landscape that remains, in Larry’s words, “very much intact” and, as Larry suggested, preserve it “for future centuries.”

   “Peeloff the partisan war paint,” said President Barack Obama a few days ago, and I couldn’t agree more. The last thing we need is division when it is quite obvious that the opposite is required for the good of all and quite possibly is the point of all of the disasters of late.

    I never fit into the black and whiteness of the blue or red parties anyway. I guess I’m part of a purple political party. A patriotic peace activist, I support veterans and military spending, but prefer it be spent on servicemen and women’s salaries, so we don’t have enlisted families who earn so little they are eligible for welfare. At the same time, yes, I wish for the return of all troops, for the end of war, and for the National Guard to be here doing what it was created to do for our country.

    I have hippie-ish qualities such as a passion for socially responsible living, but I usually wear makeup and sometimes high heels while I am burning incense and sage. I also enjoy being barefoot on the beach listening to drumming with a hula hoop spinning around me, which does not make me a vegetarian, as was assumed recently. I love pigs and also bacon; I love deer and also quite a few hunters.

    I strongly believe in the separation of church and state, and religious freedom without taboos of unorganized practices such as Paganism, an earth-based religion that does not  worship Satan. I am in favor of the legalization of marijuana and feel that most pharmaceutical drugs should be illegal.

    I tried to wrap my head around the Sandy Hook massacre this week and here’s what I came up with: After an altercation at a school, a 20-year-old, mentally ill man was denied a rifle in Danbury, Conn., due to gun control laws that required a 14-day waiting period and background check. This did not stop him from having several guns in his possession and using them to kill 20 innocent children and 6 adults in that same school. Why then, is gun control the loudest discussion I hear?

    Yes, control over the hands an assault weapon lands in makes sense, but many laws already exist and are not enforced, or simply do not work for criminals who, by definition, do not usually obey the law or apply for a permit or license. In some communities, heightened gun control has led to more than a 30-percent increase in gun violence, as well as a rise in smuggling of cheap machine guns.

    I was a pre-kindergarten teacher in what seems like another life, and I cannot begin to imagine the horror of a gunman in a school. In another former career, I worked with those who had mental illness, among them a friendly man with pyromania who told me he felt like burning the building down. I have also known those who struggle with mental illness, and studied psychology as a concentration in college. This is the issue I would like to hear more about.

    With skyrocketing rates of suicide among both civilians and military members, stigmas need to be removed and resources found to identify and help those who desperately need it. Domestic incidents reported to the police and school psychologists are a great starting point. With some told by police that their mentally ill family member must be charged with a crime in order to receive “assistance,” it’s clear that programs and support for families are a necessity too.

    Obama Care should address mental well-being, especially personality disorders, which afflict about half of all psychiatric patients and are characterized by deviant social behavior, ineffective coping skills, extreme anxiety, distress, or depression, usually traced to childhood or early adulthood.

    It should be as easy to see a psychiatrist as it is to buy a gun. I have heard too many stories of suicidal people, including military members with post-traumatic stress disorder, who had to wait over a month for a visit.

    Law-abiding citizens who use guns responsibly shouldn’t suffer, but they should exercise common sense. First off and most important, keep them locked up, whether there are kids in the house or not.

    As for school security, the “American Legion Creed” preamble almost reads as a job description, and many other former military members of all ages would qualify and appreciate the job.

    Carrie Ann Salvi is a reporter for The Star.

   When I asked her to explain WiFi for me — and, for that matter, anything else that had to do with airy nothing that has found local habitations and names in the Internet, PCs, iPhones, et cetera — Mary was helpful, but not altogether enlightening.

    “It’s all a mystery to me,” I said. “Like the afterlife.”

    “How do you know there is an afterlife?” she said. “At least we know there is such a thing as WiFi.”

    “So you say,” I said, which is what I say when I don’t know what to say next.

    There is so much more than is dreamt of in my philosophy that all I can say, sitting in this Jacuzzi in a desert, with mountains behind it, and above them the vastness of the universe, listening to Chet Baker, Paul Desmond, and Jim Hall playing “Concierto de Aranjuez,” is, “I may not be very smart, but I know what heaven is.”

    We have some time on this vacation to take delight in each other, and to remember why we were magnetized from the start. The feeling is always there, but the distractions that are in the aggregate largely known as life often get in the way.

    This week in Palm Springs is, in our 28th year of marriage, our honeymoon. She reads to me from the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales, I read to her from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and though I overdo the steaks and underdo the pork chops on the grill, it’s all right. The margaritas I’ve got down pat, thanks to Alex Silvio.

    It’s been a week in which everything’s been more than all right. No appointments to keep, no need to strip the bed because the cleaning women are coming, no urgencies, no duties of any kind.

    Ah, I’m telling you, to do nothing is to progress wonderfully.

   I got the best present ever for Christmas this year. It came a little early but I already love it.

    It’s a brand new titanium knee, given to me by Dr. Eugene Krauss of the Krauss Center for Joint Replacement in Riverhead. He was the fifth orthopedic surgeon that I saw and the first to find that I had tibial plateau necrosis, a dead bone.

    For the two years since I had a meniscus repair surgery I pleaded for relief, the pain was so debilitating. It would always hurt more on Sunday nights and I would cry. And I’m not usually a crybaby. As tears ran down my cheeks, I would beg my husband to find me help. Besides getting me in to see all these doctors, the best he could do was keep the ice packs in rotation.

    Some days I couldn’t even walk on it, other days it wasn’t so bad, but I always had a limp. I told one doctor that I was broken and nobody would fix me. I was like a doll that was missing a limb and thrown to the bottom of the toy chest, along with Elmo, the Cookie Monster, old Barbie dolls, and broken Matchbox cars.

    The bone crumbled and fell into other parts of the knee before disintegrating. One doctor told me it was all in my head. Seriously? I walked in to his office with a cane. And, no rhyme intended, but I am somewhat vain. As a woman of a certain age, I’m fighting the aging thing on every level. The last thing I wanted people to see was me on a cane!

    There have been many things I’ve imagined: Santa Claus, the ghost of my mother, and the Boogeyman under my bed, but never would I self-willingly inflict pain upon myself. That’s no fun, and I never thought I was that powerful.

    I must say, though, that people are much nicer to you when you walk with a cane. I had doors opened and held for me, I was told to go to the head of the line at the pharmacy, and people moved out of my way, always casting me a look of sympathy.

    Another doctor giggled when my knee didn’t jump as my reflexes were checked with that tiny gadget that looks like a hammer used by elves in Santa’s workshop. The doctor said I had a dead knee, which I didn’t realize at the time is something that could actually happen to a person, and then she giggled. Looking back, I wonder why that doctor didn’t help me more, or at the very least contact my surgeon to say, “You know, I think she’s got something there.”

    I was told I had arthritis, edema, bursitis, and a severely bruised tibia, which was somewhat true — but it wasn’t bruised, it was dead, tongue hanging out of its cartilage dead, floppy dead, disintegrating dead, suffering a slow and painful death that was harder for me than it was for the bone.

    A top New York surgeon who operated on me for another meniscus tear in February told me in June when I returned to see him because the pain was so bad that I should just keep riding the stationary bike until my thighs quivered. He said the pain would eventually go away. At this point I’d like to see his head quiver until it went away. He took an X-ray and said the knee looked fine. But shouldn’t a doctor of his reputation know that a necrosis does not show up on an X-ray? Surf the Internet like the rest of us, Doc.

    My husband never lost faith that I would stage a comeback, even after I thought this was it, this would be my lot in life. The whole experience made me realize just how much he must love me. He did the grocery shopping, cooked all the meals, emptied the dishwasher when it was needed, and walked my dog, which was the job I missed the most. Instead of Mom always in the kitchen, the kids got used to seeing Dad bent over the stove and setting the dinner table.

    Finally, I called Dr. Krauss for an appointment that took over two months to get. He ordered an MRI of the area beneath my knee where I was having the worst pain, and lo and behold, he found the dead bone. Apparently my blood got lazy and stopped flowing to the area and it killed it. During my worst days I told my husband that I felt like I was walking around on a broken, crushed knee and it turns out I was walking around on a broken, crushed knee.

    I hope I’m not boring you with my knee story but to others who are suffering from chronic pain, I’d like to give you this gift: Don’t give up. There is a doctor out there who can help you. With my husband nudging me, I trudged to doctors in Southampton, Garden City, Manhattan, and, of course, East Hampton, before Dr. Krauss was recommended.

    And so, Santa, I’d like to say thank you. I’d also like to thank all the people in Montauk who have helped me through this in so many little ways over the last two and half years. I can say with confidence that I think I am now fixed. I might even tie a bright red Christmas bow around my leg on Tuesday.

    To the doctors who failed me miserably I say, Bah humbug to you. But to Dr. Krauss, who had compassion and looked a little deeper, I say thank you. And if I never visit a doctor’s office again Santa has delivered my Christmas wishes. And to my family I say, Mommy’s back. Now, get out of my kitchen!

   Janis Hewitt is a senior writer for The Star.