ONE CAN EAT only so many fabulous holiday meals before thoughts of death creep in: Another dish, another serving, another feast, a week to go, I will burst like an overcooked sausage and be buried in a piano crate! Luckily the season of big food does come to an end, and we find ourselves confronted with (in addition to a number of unwelcome extra pounds) the plain, unvarnished fact of winter, of turnips and carrots and kale and cold gray skies – all purifying in their bleakness.

Of the many virtues that in recent years seem to have vanished from American life, a certain Yankee asceticism is probably the least noticed and least mourned. The word ascetic has an unfavorable ring to our luxe-conditioned ears, sounding as it does of acid and sourness. Its meaning too – of turning away from worldly pleasures, if only for a while, if only to savor them more when one finally does return to them – does not suit the present national mood of gluttony, of having as much as possible of everything at all times at the lowest possible price.

The truth is that plentitude is exhausting. The more one has, whether food or cheap oil or marble bathrooms with gold fixtures, the more one wants and the less satisfying all of it is. Opium addicts are familiar with this apparent paradox. It is life out of balance – koyaanisqatsi in Hopi, a word that served as the title to the 1983 movie.

It is important, from time to time, to do without and go without, if only to remind ourselves that we can, and that most of the worldly treasure most of us spend most of our time trying to accumulate is nice but not really important. Abundance is a burden – it is keeping track, maintaining, fixing or replacing, trying not to get fat – but it is also an option. Most of us do not need more of anything, except possibly exercise. But there seems to be a cultural consensus not to admit it, lest we seem ... ascetic?

In my youth my mother reliably inveighed against the mindless lust to amass possessions. At the time I thought her speeches were dour and unsporting, but I have come to see the wisdom in them and in their corollary: that we are better off with small doses of material life, if those doses are carefully chosen and charged with quality and meaning, than with overloads of mass-produced meaninglessness – Big Gulps and Hummers and January tomatoes with vermin genes. A finger of good brandy doesn't beat a fist-size chunk of river bottom pie every day, but it does most days. That is asceticism with style.