I went to a funeral last Saturday. Four days before Christmas, the weather was unseasonably mild. This funeral was at the United Methodist Church in the Camp Ground. Karen Berube had died of complications from metastatic breast cancer; she was 63 and fought her illness valiantly and cheerfully until the very last days of her life.

The freshman history classes recently traveled the Island’s African American Heritage Trail from Chappaquiddick to Aquinnah as part of their study of the history of Martha’s Vineyard. They visited the home of the Island’s only whaling captain, walked to his grave, paid their respects at the site dedicated to the life of Rebecca, the Woman from Africa and stood at West Basin visualizing the escape of Randall Burton, the man who had decided he would rather die than return to enslavement.

I say this almost every day — today was one of the strangest days of my life. I began saying this phrase, genuinely, four years ago on the first day of my freshman year at Wesleyan University when the routine of my previous 18 years was first upturned. I didn’t realize that I was overusing the phrase, even though every night at dinner in Usdan, Wesleyan’s cafeteria, as I reflected on my day, my conclusion was always that it had indeed been the strangest day. After a few months of this, my new friends called me on it. Surely, every day could not be the strangest of your life, they said.

It was a dark but not stormy night. Just a merry crispness in the air. It was Saturday, two days after Thanksgiving, around the dinner hour. We were all snug in our post-tryptophan haze in Vineyard Haven when suddenly all hell broke loose outside. Here’s the play-by-play.

A Christmas story by the late Dorothy West, an Oak Bluffs writer and last surviving member of the Harlem Renaissance.

In the annual Gazette Christmas poem Santa finds something in his sack for almost everyone.