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unsaved remnants of daylight petering out before the workday ends? In my childhood, as early as that, I remember observing the same despair every autumn: the feeling that sunshine, summertime, and probably life itself had passed me by before I’d even finished a halfway decent tree fort. But mine is not to question those who command the springing forward and the falling back. I only vow each winter to try harder to live like a potato, with its tacit understanding that time is time, no matter what any clock might say. I get through the hibernation months by hovering as close as possible to the woodstove without actual self-immolation, and catching up on my reading, cheered at regular intervals by the excess of holidays that collect in a festive logjam at the outflow end of our calendar.

We are a household of mixed spiritual backgrounds, and some of the major holidays are not ours, including any that commands its faithful to buy stuff nobody needs. But we celebrate plenty. We give away our salsas and chutneys as gifts, and make special meals for family and friends: turkey and stuffing. Leg of lamb with mint jelly and roasted root vegetables tossed with rosemary and olive oil. For New Year’s Day, the traditional southern black-eyed peas and rice, for good luck. Always in the background, not waiting for a special occasion, is the businesslike whir of the bread-machine paddles followed by the aroma of Steven’s bread-of-the-day filling the whole house. We have our ways of making these indoor months a more agreeable internment.

When a brand-new organic corn chip factory opened its doors twenty miles from our house, at least one member of our family took it as a sign that wishes do come true. But finding wheat flour for our bread continued to be our most frustrating pursuit. A historic mill five miles from our house processes corn and other specialty flours, but not whole wheat. So we were excited to discover a wheat-flour mill about an hour’s drive away, a family operation we were happy to support. But the product, frankly, wasn’t what we wanted: bromide-bleached white flour. They also sold a biscuit mix fortified with MSG. We asked if they could process batches of whole wheat or unbleached white flour for us, but we were just one family without enough influence to change even a small company’s program. We needed fellow locavores to add clout to our quest, and in time we’ll have them. For the time being we liberally supplemented the local product with an organic brand made from wheat grown in Vermont. We sometimes made our own pasta, but more commonly were buying that, too, from outside our state. Ditto for breakfast cereals, though the motherlode was a large package of David and Elsie’s amazing oatmeal they sent us as a gift. Some things followed us home from Italy, too, including permanently influenced tastes in wine. But we stuck by our commitment to local meats and produce. In the realm of processed foods, we’d mostly forgotten what’s out there.

We’d long since said good-bye to summer’s fruits, in exchange for some that are bountiful in December: antique apples, whose flavor improves with cold weather; native persimmons, which aren’t edible until after frost hits the tree. It’s also the season of citrus in the Deep South, and if you don’t live there, the transfer of oranges across a few states from Florida or Texas still seems more reasonable than some fruit on walkabout from another hemisphere. Our holiday food splurge was a small crate of tangerines, which we found ridiculously thrilling after an eight-month abstinence from citrus. No matter where I was in the house, that vividly resinous orangey scent woke up my nose whenever anyone peeled one in the kitchen. Lily hugged each one to her chest before undressing it as gently as a doll. Watching her do that as she sat cross-legged on the floor one morning in pink pajamas, with bliss lighting her cheeks, I thought: Lucky is the world, to receive this grateful child. Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing.

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