The first of Azed’s Letters Latent puzzles since VE(S)TAL in 2009. I won’t give the complete preamble since you have no doubt already seen it, but letters are missing from each answer whenever they occur and these missing letters make an appropriate seasonal quotation. The definition is to the whole word, the subsidiary indication to the word with letters missing. Two words are missing from this quotation and the first one is clued like all the rest in the puzzle; the second one is the competition clue-word.
In the answers I have given the omitted letters in lower-case.
The quotation (which I have to admit to finding using Google) was from Ernest Dowson: ‘pale amber sunlight falls across the [reddening October] trees’.
As with all Azed’s specials, this was much enjoyed.