Autumn has been more promise than reality this year, with warm, wet days lingering well past the time when hard frost ordinarily lays claim to the land. It’s been so warm at times that many trees and shrubs were fooled into a second spring of sorts. Bridal wreath that flowered in June wore soft new green leaves in October. In early November, a young skunk cabbage shoot poked through deep mud near a stream, looking slightly forlorn and out of place amid freshly-fallen piles of red and gold leaves from beech and swamp maple.

Bay scallopers have been out in shirtsleeves beneath waders and rubber overalls. And if we needed a reminder that this is an Island, there has been wind — strong, gusty blows that hang on for days, roughing up seas, shuttering ferry service and bringing down limbs and trees in back yards and deep places in the woods.

When a tree comes down, suddenly the light changes, casting new shadows on old cart paths and slanting differently through the windows of the gray-shingled houses that dot the Island.

And November light has its own unique qualities. In the early morning it brushes the cerulean blue eastern sky over Chappaquiddick with bright, new-day hues of orange and yellow. In late afternoon it bathes the moors of Aquinnah in rich tones of gold and mahogany. The light fades quickly during these shortening days, and dusk falls like a curtain on the natural stage that is the ever-changing Vineyard landscape.

Thanksgiving is Thursday.

The Vineyard is bustling with summer people back for the holiday weekend, college kids returning home, families and friends gathering. There will be home-cooked meals, long walks on beaches and conservation trails, and expeditions to down-Island retail stores and the up-Island artisans fair as the traditional holiday shopping season begins. It’s nice to see so many people out and about before the Island dons its winter mantle of deep quiet.

This may well be the only American holiday that has somehow escaped ruin by over-commercialism — and that is something to be thankful for.

In an essay, longtime Gazette editor Henry Hough wrote the following about Thanksgiving:

The most significant holidays are inherited. The older they are and the more freighted with tradition and association through generations of dwellers on our own soil, the more precious they become. So it is with Thanksgiving, the holiday of all the year that comes closest to the common terms of daily life.

It is less sacred than and in different perspective and proportion from Christmas; it lacks the patriotic legend of the Fourth of July; it is not so tender as Memorial Day. But it is our own; it belongs in the rooms where we were young and are now growing old, in kitchen and dining room, and in the late autumn fields outside where the migrating birds gather, and in the woods where we see the last leaves falling and the blue sky overhead. It belongs in our hearts.

Not all of us earn Thanksgiving with labor on the soil and among the animals of the farms, but the instinct of the forefathers who did this, unaided and long ago, is still strong in our bodies. The scent of Indian summer coming across the woods and hills revives memories that are not really ours individually but those of the race, and so firmly has the succession been kept that the first Thanksgiving is still our Thanksgiving, and the Thanksgiving men and women who first sat with harvest-laden board and offered prayer for the yield of this Island’s soil and waters and the air through which the wild fowl flew overhead.

Through all the years the striving has been different but not less. The only rewards that count are still hard-earned. Still we lack security and in our own lives seek in vain the harmony that blesses the land and the water around us through the seasons, even under the lash of northeast gales and drifting snow. The lack is spur to our further striving, and in the expectation of more labor and more effort ahead, we find contentment now, and we hope it is the same sort the founders knew, the contentment of keeping faith.

Sending out warm wishes to all Gazette readers near and far for a happy Thanksgiving. Please remember not to drink and drive.