‘Twas Christmas Eve and Santa Claus / Was readying to fly / From out of his North Pole lodging / With his reindeer in the sky.

This book is a labor of love — of Lake Michigan, and, in particular, of North Manitou Island, today part of a national park but for generations before that, an island for farming, fishing and vacationing.

Not so long ago, or so it seems to me, I was leaf-crunching with delight in the West Tisbury woods or taking Sunday walks down Middle Road into Chilmark.

A drone operator was called in last week to rescue a lost Jack Russell terrier that was finally found in Edgartown.

For more than 15 years, from the 1960s into the 1980s, Broadway and Hollywood costume designer Patricia Zipprodt was the owner of the 19th-century West Tisbury farmhouse, God’s Pocket, on the West Tisbury-Edgartown road.

On a recent Sunday after noon, the wind notwithstanding, I went for a walk along the west bank of West Tisbury’s controversial Mill Pond.