Excerpted reflections on Christmas from William Caldwell in 1972.

The Christmas baskets have become a habit, so firmly established that when the two of us pick the first pailful of rose hips from the bramble on the beach it is not the lap of water that we hear but the sound of sleigh bells in the sky.

Sleighbells in June on the beach, wondering that rosa rugosa survives the storms that sweep the winter surf over it — sleighbells on the Chappaquiddick moors in midsummer, in the thickets of grapes in fall, among gnarled beach plums in September’s glassy silences. Christmas comes but two or three dozen times a year.

It began years and years ago, when we lived on a distant mainland and interested ourselves from time to time in December by wondering what people like us, who had no wants of which we were conscious, could wish for if some imp in soot-tarnished red were to grant us all our druthers.

It was agreed the wish would not be banal . . . and it was agreed that whatever it was, the gift must be a surprise, utterly unpredictable.

And it came to pass, as one had better say in any Christmas story, that my wife and I confessed to each other that all we wanted for Christmas, there in the soot-dripping smog of northern New Jersey, was Martha’s Vineyard. All of it, of course, the dunes and scrubby little hills, the look of Edgartown’s white mansions away up the harbor, the grumble and leaping white flame of the Atlantic’s breaking on the far side of South Beach — all of it.

But if all of it could not be delivered in a package lowered down a chimney flue, then we’d be adequately surprised and satisfied if we were to find beside the fireplace in the morning, a basket in which would be perhaps a glass or so of beach plum jelly, one each of huckleberry jam and mint jelly and wild grape conserve, a jar of rose hip marmalade, perhaps a quart bottle of tomato relish, something with wild cranberry in it, something that would involve the pale grape leaves of early spring.

And all these reminders that Eden is alive and well and living on Martha’s Vineyard would be wrapped in crisp bright cellophane, and we’d strip it away and hold the jewel-toned jams and jellies up to the light . . . and on February mornings we’d have the sunny tang of beach plum jelly on our toast and be able to believe again there’s reason for hope.

So we wished, and through the summers we’ve laid up, glass by glass, something akin to frankincense and myrrh for people in distant places who have everything except what in December they need and have no way of knowing that they want.

We were about to take cartons of things to the spare bedroom, array them along the walls, fetch baskets and wrapping paper, and start packing the Vineyard for Dave and Dottie, Marj and Karl, Miss Grace, Robert and Mary, Mildred, Jim, Larry, Ruth, all those quiet desperadoes in the cities.

From late June there is rose hip marmalade.

In July we put up another batch of rose hip marmalade and mint jelly. Something with green grapes in it dates to August. In September we gave up on the tomatoes along the wall of the kitchen. With peppers and onions and homemade vinegar and spices they went into a frantic overproduction of green tomato relish. And in September another moment of truth: this was the beach plums’ off year, and the wild grapes wouldn’t make it; but there were enough of each for a taste all round.

In November the shortbread and fruitcake were started, in time to ripen, and only last week we finished the fruit-soggy stollens. Nothing much left to be done except the crocks of cheese — Danish blue rubbed and beaten with cream cheese and brandy and pistachios to the texture of soft butter — and the delivering of the Vineyard, shimmering, — to doorsteps along dank and darkling streets.

Let no one remonstrate that this is too much about giving. It is, rather, a family’s discovery that the Vineyard is an unpredictable surprise. No matter how often it happens, whether on the sun deck of the Islander or on a toasted English muffin, it is a shock, an almost unbearable pang of nostalgia — the homesickness that certifies you know where home is and what.

Kneeling to pack the baskets, you remember now in the year’s deathbed hours the smell of summer salt, the stillness in the upland woods, the halt and heave of the boat on they way to the heaths of Wasque. Huckleberry jam, you read from the label, and you thank whatever gods they are that grant us such fathomless delight in getting something ready for dinner.