Columnists

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.

Can you believe, 10 percent of high school students, when questioned, think Judge Judy is a member of the Supreme Court, when, as everyone knows, she’s on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals? (Just kidding!)

Just the other night, with nothing better to do, and nothing to interest me at the office, I thought I would drive around a little and see the Christmas lights of the town. I took my leave from friends who I had been visiting on Gould Street, and headed off for a turn around the pond, where a brightly lit tree blazed in the center.

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.

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?

“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.

The East Hampton Star staff has been making more frequent trips to the library next door ever since Starbucks installed a coffee machine on the front desk. This I know, not because we have a sophisticated indoor surveillance system, but because my second-floor window on the south side of the Star building looks onto the sidewalk that runs between our driveway and the library’s Main Street entryway.

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.

Soon after the midterms I considered ordering a bumper sticker that would read: “Don’t Blame Me — I’m From East Hampton.”

Three times in this wettest of falls I’ve thought of Jeremy Renner in “The Hurt Locker,” miserably scooping leaves from gutters back home from Iraq before it helps drive him to rotate back in — for more bomb squad duty.

Long-ago Bridgehampton was wild. And by wild I don’t mean the wolves, slander lawsuits, and dispossessing the native people that

A goose for Thanksgiving dinner was a perfect choice for the seven members of the family who were able to be there. During our preliminary arrangements, we had reserved a free-range turkey of between 14 and 20 pounds from our favorite source: Peter Ludlow of the Mecox Bay Dairy farm in Bridgehampton. But our guest numbers were down by a few this year, and in the week before Turkey Day, we decided to make it Goose Day instead, going for a 12-pound gander.

We’ve returned from a Thanksgiving dinner on the Eastern Shore that would have made even Ina Garten envious. And the house, whose core dates to 1876 or so, was beautiful, the most beautiful one I’ve ever been in.

One of the few positives of being home ill for several days, even with the flu, is that you have time to think. Or not. In my case this week, 30 straight hours of sleep were punctuated by only brief periods of lucidity. During one of them, I realized I was wrong to have made light of my too-late, Thanksgiving-eve vaccination in the paper last week.

Do you wander around with a song in your head? Do you wake up in the middle of the night because your hippocampus offers up mood music appropriate for what you have been doing during the day?

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?”

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.

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.

The report from the pediatrician was not good. The fever and cough that kept Ellis home from school last week was the flu or had turned into it along the way. Word went out to the various siblings, friends, and family members: Get your flu shot; even if you were already exposed, the vaccination would lessen the flu’s severity if it did pop up.

Can you believe Thanksgiving is next week? It is a cliché to rhetorically ask where the time has gone, but this autumn, with the dramatic news cycle unfolding at such a breathless pace, it is flying by faster than ever. Don’t you agree?

The Day of the Dead was lively and bright. The sun streamed through the trees in the early morning, and in the afternoon it was so warm that the tennis lesson to which I’d taken our granddaughter was held outside. I couldn’t recall a First of November being so gentle.

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.

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.

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?

So, is it to be AR-15s for all? One would think so given the shoulder-shrugging by officialdom that greets massacre after massacre. Oh well, there will always be crazies — a few bad eggs in the barrel. Can’t let them spoil it for everyone, this being a God-fearing and gun-loving country.

With apology to Daniel Webster, it is a small thing but there are those who hate it. And, as another saying goes, all politics are local. So, with that in mind, I believe it is time to address what is for me one of the most local of all matters: the Route 114 roundabout.

The heart of Riverhead — and by that I do not mean its nearby shopping centers — has a lot of culture and history going for it.

My father used to say all I did was watch balls go back and forth, and so it has been — volleyballs, basketballs, soccer balls, tennis balls, baseballs, rugby balls, footballs . . . though, come to think of it, not so many footballs anymore.

I think I have just escaped being victimized by a new scam, which popped down the chimney, so to speak, right in time for the flue season.

There were two messages on my voice mail when I got to the office last Thursday morning. Both were in response to an editorial on Republican voter suppression in advance of the midterm elections.