With Christmas just around the corner, I have been thinking cherries.

Most Vineyard families top off their holiday turkey dinners with pumpkin or mince pie. But in our family cherry pie has always been the grand finale. So when, a while ago, I had a chance to visit Door County, Wisc., and found out that Wisconsin is the country’s fourth largest producer of cherries — after Michigan, Utah and New York, I decided I would take a trip to the Badger State. I’d never seen a badger so that was an additional lure. And, in addition to badgers and cherries, Door County is known for lighthouses, dunes, shoreline and picturesque harbors. Out there, they liken it to Cape Cod, but it could also be likened to the Island. But neither Cape Cod nor the Vineyard have badgers nor that magical pie ingredient — cherries.

In my West Tisbury backyard I have a cherry tree, planted from a pit some years ago. It has not flourished, but it has at least grown. Last summer, it produced its best crop yet — a dozen sour cherries. They are just the kind I need for proper cherry pies, but, obviously, I didn’t have enough to fill a pie crust and the hungry birds, netting notwithstanding, did severe damage to my slim pickings.

Door County looked like the answer to my problem. There I could surely find canned sour cherries without the gluey cornstarch that is part of a can of pie cherries these days in the East. (The last Island bastion of proper sour cherries for pies was the Reliable Market in Oak Bluffs, but they are no longer there. I hope Bobby Pacheco will do something about that!) So off I went last fall to Wisconsin, cherry hunting. While I was at it, I climbed lighthouses since the Great Lakes are renowned for them.

I went to the top of the 1869 Cana Lighthouse that I was told is the most photographed lighthouse in the Great Lakes. Then I climbed the stairs of the Eagle Bluff Lighthouse that was built in the Civil War. When I came home, those two lights inspired me to visit the Gay Head Lighthouse. Of course, our lighthouse, built in 1856, is even older than Door County’s. Theirs were important in guiding Great Lakes shipping and they have more of them than we do. There are 10 lighthouses on Lake Michigan though not all still work. We have only five, but all do their nightly flashing.

But the purpose of my mission was not lighthouses but cherry hunting.

On the first night of my visit, while I watched the sunset over Slater Bay, I sipped the best Margarita I have ever had — made with cherry juice. The next morning at a winery and market, I found dried cherries, sweet and sour, bottled cherry juice, jars of cherry jam and just the sour cherries that I wanted for my Christmas pies. But they were rolling around in jars of crimson juice.

Once coming back from a trip to Spain, I carried bottles of olive oil and bought an extra suitcase for them. But there was no time to buy an extra suitcase in Door County. I was too busy eating cherry pies and cherry cobblers, chocolate-covered cherries, cherry muffins and cherry ice cream and dried cherries all washed down with either cherry juice spiked or straight, or with cherry wine. I visited villages with picturesque names like Hedgehog Harbor and Egg Harbor — reportedly named when picnickers en route there got bored and started throwing eggs at each other — and Fish Creek, famous for its Victorian houses and the 75-year-old Peninsula Players, the oldest summer theatre in the nation.

As I nibbled dried cherries at one farm stop, I asked how they would be baked in a pie. No one seemed certain. One helpful clerk suggested that I might buy a 10-gallon basket of frozen cherries. I could probably call the basket carry-on luggage on the plane and not have to pack it in my suitcase, she posited. And by the time I reached New England, the cherries should be just about thawed. And I could get all the Christmas pies I wanted from 10 gallons. Could I refreeze the cherries once they were in pie form? She wasn’t sure about that. I did not buy the 10-gallon basket of frozen cherries.

Sadly, I returned from Wisconsin empty-handed — at least as far as cherries are concerned, And I never saw a badger.

I’m happy that I went to Door County. I always enjoy seeing new sights. But Christmas is coming and the hunt is on for sour cherries. My West Tisbury neighbor George Hartman, another cherry pie lover, and I considered ordering them from a bakery in Fish Creek that will mail them, but it’s a costly affair.

So I put out an SOS to New Hampshire, where family cherry pie sleuth Peter Meras tracked them down in a Portsmouth Super Wal-Mart. The cherries were from Oregon, a bit of a comedown.

But our Christmas will be a cherry pie Christmas after all.