Bedtime comes early this time of the year, or at least we try. I’m up an hour before the kids have to be out of bed to get a couple of ounces of coffee down before trying to cajole them into their clothes, to brush their teeth, to eat breakfast. If they make the bus, the older two are gone by 7:30. Then it’s time to stuff the youngest one into his car seat for his ride to school.

    At the other end of the day, the great holiday driving marathon has begun in which my wife, Lisa, and I shuttle the kids to and from lessons, parties, rehearsals, and shopping. Somewhere amid all of this moving around we have neglected to figure out what to cook for dinner and there aren’t even enough eggs in the fridge to whip up a batch of pancakes in the morning.

    Because Lisa cannot get away from her work as a teacher as easily as I can duck out of the Star office, my days have been punctuated by a midday run to pick up child number three from prenursery and take him to his baby sitter’s, and another at 5 p.m. to get child number two after play practice.

    Compounding matters is the rate at which my gas-guzzling truck burns through my wallet’s contents. And worse, how much these trips contribute in greenhouse gases. This has had me coveting a more fuel-efficient vehicle, but the price tag of what I really want, a nifty Volkswagen turbo diesel wagon that goes 40 miles on a gallon, is steep. Even factoring in the savings on fuel, the payback period would be long, and there is always something else that jumps ahead as a spending priority.

    So I lumber on in my rattling 2000 Toyota, getting to know all the potholes between here and Bridgehampton, watching the Canada geese drifting overhead toward their nighttime redoubt on Poxabogue Pond.

    By the time I pick up Evvy and head back east for Ellis, it is dark, and since it is only 5:30 or so, traffic is heavy. My eyes, tired from a day looking at my computer screen, strain as the oncoming headlights glare off my dusty windshield; the lines that carry the washer fluid having corroded away 50,000 miles ago.

    We are home before 6 most weeknights. If it is clear, I try to get the kids to look up at the stars on our way in from the driveway. Lisa and Adelia, our firstborn, get home a little later. By then I usually have something or other going for dinner.

   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.

   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.

   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.

   A curse for someone who has to sit down in the morning and write a column is to be asked, “What are you going to write about?” It is doubly effective if the question comes right before the last one to be written in the year, when, I suppose, it is time to strike a note of some gravity or prediction or resolution.

    So, as I sat down at the computer on a quiet morning the day after Christmas, I came up blank. There was little noise in the house other than the breathing of our ancient pug, who was resting in the dog bed she reluctantly shares with our pet house-pig. The north wind of the night before had stopped; looking through the kitchen windows, even the smallest of winter’s bare branches were still. Our children were still asleep, tired from a long run the day before. Starting early with presents, then a brunch here, then a round of visiting that ended at nearly 11 p.m., it had been a good day.

   So I sat, thinking that I welcomed the near-total silence in the house. The year, and especially the month or two leading up to the day after Christmas, had been demanding. Summer had come and gone with its frenetic pace. And then, when I thought things were about to wind down, Hurricane Sandy upended normal routines. Against the tense backdrop of the presidential race, the war in Afghanistan and drone strikes in Pakistan continued to add to the lists of the dead, though Americans seemed increasingly immune to the news. Then came the Newtown, Conn., killings.

    This has been a year for reflection necessitated by events, but events that are difficult to process. The great annual reset that is the period between Christmas and New Year’s Day, could not come soon enough, as far as 2012 is concerned.

   I love winter here: The office phones ring less in January and February. The great and unrelenting river of e-mail narrows a bit. There is time for a walk on the beach, time to plan. There is time to be with our thoughts between distractions, and this I look forward to most of all.

   The story goes that when I was a little girl of about 4 or 5 I went next door to a neighbor’s house and asked if she would sell me two pieces of bread for a nickel. The woman of the house was worried that we had no food and my mother was mortified. I think I was just practicing my future yard sale skills. Although I would never insult anyone by asking them if they would take a nickel for Grandma’s old serving dish.

    When I serve my 20-pound turkey today, it will be on a large white platter I purchased for $1 at a yard sale. My turnips will be in a bowl the color of a harvest moon with sheaves of wheat imprinted on its front that also cost me $1. Tagged for $1.50, I bargained with the owner, which really made me feel like a cheapskate, even though I’m usually not. But yard sales tend to bring out the worst in people.

    My holiday wineglasses, a set of eight, are rose-colored goblets that I bought from an old Montauk family many years ago at the exorbitant rate of $10 for the set, the most I’ve probably ever paid for something at a yard sale. I still pull them out on every special occasion, so they were worth it. I probably would have paid $12 for the set, which is what they were selling for, but my bargaining chip kicked in.

    I enjoy going to yard sales and used to go more frequently when my mother lived in Montauk. She was the original thrifter and dragged my sister and me when we were young to thrift stores all over the Bronx every weekend. In Montauk on Saturdays, my sister, my mother, and I would set off and make the rounds of those advertised in this paper. But my mother was embarrassing — everything was too expensive for her and she had no problem proclaiming that loudly as my sister and I slinked back to the car, pretending that we weren’t with her.

    My sister and I even made the mistake of having a yard sale — once at her house in the harbor area and once at mine out near the Lighthouse. They were both disasters, and a lot of work — a lot of work. At yard sales people don’t expect to pay much, even for really nice things, like the pair of wool gloves in perfect shape that one woman offered me a nickel for. I found that really insulting. I mean, I knew they were itchy, but she didn’t.

    And then there was the pine hutch with cupboard doors that my sister was selling for $50 at a driveway sale in the spring. One lady kept asking her if she would take $10 for it, and even stalked her house when the sale was over, peeking in her windows and doing drive-bys as if she was going to swipe it. Hours later, she returned and knocked on the door to offer her the measly $10 again, as if she were doing her a favor and taking it off her hands. By then my sister had decided to keep it and give it to a friend who was furnishing an apartment.

    On a really nice fall day last year, I decided to clean out my garage a bit. I say a bit because to really clean out my garage would take months. We’ve raised three children in this house and my husband is a fisherman and you know what type of junk they collect: buckets, nets, fishing reels and poles, squid jigs that I’m sure are going to spring open and attack me, heavy rain gear, and slimy boots that are not allowed in the house.

    Things have gotten eaten up in our garage, never to be seen again. Like our chain saw that is somewhere under the Barbie Dream House, which is covered with the Mexican blanket that was given me. Next to them are three metal garden tables that I bought at a yard sale for refinishing that are still not refinished and chipping paint all over my Mexican blanket. There are endless bags of clothes, either outgrown or no longer in style, and all of this is on top of my husband’s go-cart, which we’re trying to get out and fixed by Christmas for our grandson.

    But I digress. The day I was cleaning out the garage, three cars pulled up in front of my house, thinking it was a yard sale — on a Wednesday? No one has yard sales during the week. I didn’t say anything and let them look through the junk I had pulled out and ended up making $2.35 and had less stuff to put back in. But I’m telling you, yard sale shoppers can sometimes be vultures, picking over your things and offering measly prices.

    Maybe this long holiday weekend will be a good time to attempt to clean the garage and have another yard sale, but I’m sure we’ll all be too full of turkey and stuffing to do much work. Besides, it’s Black Friday, and though I don’t go near the stores, I hear it’s a good weekend for yard sales.

    Janis Hewitt is a senior writer for The Star.

   Thanks to guys from Woburn, Mass., we got our power back on the afternoon of Sunday, Nov. 4. As for our own utility, I sighted my first LIPA trucks on Nov. 7 (the first day of the northeaster) heading up Three Mile Harbor Road — 10 days after the superstorm hit and two hours after we’d been rendered powerless again.

    Lulled by the euphoria of having uninterrupted lights, heat, and hot water for two and a half days, I had been ripping through The New York Times crossword puzzle and was planning on refilling the two-person Jacuzzi we never use except in such situations or when we need to wash the window screens, when there was an ominous flicker, and then, as can happen when you’re long-married and well-attuned to one another, simultaneous exclamations of “Oh, shit!”

    Bill Leland, our neighbor, who has lived in Tiffany Estates in south-central Springs since the early 1970s, deserves the credit for getting our thickly populated neighborhood’s lights back on in the first instance. A tree that fell onto the wires in front of a house at the intersection of Oak Ledge and Harbor View soon after the hurricane began was the culprit. Everyone knew it, including LIPA, though because the utility’s antiquated maps have us down as a “light-density area” (which may have been the case some 40 years ago), we were told, in effect, to cool it for six to 10 more days.

    When, at about the same time, I ran into Dom Annacone at Damark’s Deli and told him what LIPA had reportedly said, he, who had just had his power restored in Settlers Landing, replied, “If you’re considered a light-density area, then I live in a desert — there  are only a few houses on my street. . . . This is what happens when you’re dealing with a monopoly.”

    But, thank goodness, Bill Leland, whose son Danny thinks the time has come to have our own utility here, as Greenport does, was not so easily put off: He sought out the foreman of the Massachusetts State Electric crew, which was working in Clearwater that Saturday, and persuasively made his case for “the 80 to 90 houses” in our neighborhood that were, despite the fact that the problem was in plain sight and could be easily remedied, still languishing.

    I would like to say that the branches of palm trees were strewn before them as their trucks pulled in; instead, they were greeted by sandwiches made by Ryann Zaykowski Brennan. “Hosanna! Hosanna!” I imagined us crying as the Woburn guys went to work.

    On the bright side, the storm had given us a chance to pass some time with our hard-working, resourceful, and friendly neighbors.

    Mary brought flowers over to Bill Leland the next day, and she’s thinking of having everyone over for a pot-luck party when this all blows over. That’s the good news.

   It’s a toss-up whether the most astonishing thing about the post-Sandy gas lines here was that they happened at all or that they ended so abruptly when the state imposed odd-even rationing.

    For those who were not in the New York-New Jersey region to see it, let me describe what happened. When word spread on the Thursday after the hurricane that supplies were going to run out, a collective freak-out quickly followed. Drivers immediately converged on the gas stations to top off their tanks.

    From what I heard, Montauk was the first to run out, followed shortly by Amagansett. The Internet, particularly Facebook and Twitter, seemed filled with alarming reports, no doubt adding to the sense of doom.

    Elected officials issued statements. The federal government started trucking additional supplies into the region. Nothing helped; the lines of waiting drivers continued to build. Police were tapped to keep order. On the South Fork, a half-hour wait was considered quick.

    Seriously line-averse in my own case, I got lucky early one morning finding an open pump at the Amagansett Mobil, and, until the kids’ school reopened, I was able to keep my driving to a minimum to conserve fuel.

    Today, an odd-numbered day, with my gas-hog truck’s fuel gauge dropping below a quarter of a tank, I’ll have to head to one of the stations. I anticipate all will seem normal — but why now and not a week ago?

    That rationing put an instant end to the lines is pretty good evidence that the lines were created by panic, not a complete loss of supply, which the industry said was crimped but not cut off. Fear made it all much worse than it needed to be.

    But it also made clear just how motor-dependent most of us in the Northeast are and just how much of the non-renewable juice our vehicles drink.