December 27, 1981

For the last 13 years Shea Stadium has been deserted this late in December. But it will come to life at noon today, when the Jets face the Buffalo Bills in the American Conference wild-card playoff. These original American Football League franchises never have met in a postseason game. But it will be the 45th time they have played each other since they performed in their very first A.F.L. game in the Polo Grounds in 1960, when the Jets won convincingly. It certainly is not the first time they have challenged each other in 1981. The pair helped open the pro football season in a game that sent the Jets into an immediate tailspin as the Bills, the defending Eastern Division champions, produced a 31-0 victory at Buffalo's Rich Stadium. After an 0-3 start, the Jets began winning, though. They toppled the Bills, 33-14, in their second meeting, at Shea Stadium. The Bills are weaker than in their opener. They have lost cocaptains, Reggie McKenzie, a guard, and Shane Nelson, a linebacker. Otherwise, Buffalo's personnel is essentially the same - which means good and explosive - but the Jets in many ways are a different club.

Many Poles, stunned by two weeks of police roundups and industrial violence, wished each other ''peaceful holidays'' last week instead of the usual ''happy holidays.'' The country's apprehension was reflected by Archbishop Jozef Glemp, the Roman Catholic Primate, who warned in his Christmas Eve homily of ''the danger of fraticidal war'' and called for a ''year of reconstruction.'' Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski's Military Council of National Salvation, apparently having brought most of the country under control, began trying to win its acquiescence, which is essential to salvaging what's left of the economy. Curfew hours were shortened. Holiday meat, eggs, and fish appeared on some Warsaw store shelves, evidently from military stockpiles. Thousands of union activists, writers, educators and artists were still under arrest or detention, but the General nevertheless called in 59 of their colleagues to ask for support. This set off ''a long and open debate,'' Warsaw television said.

For the first time since the end of World War II, government employment is declining, a development that many experts say poses major implications for workers and the public. In the 12-months ended Nov. 1, government employment declined by 316,000 workers: 40,000 at the Federal level, 30,000 at the state level, and 246,000 at the local level. Since 1919, which is as far back as Bureau of Labor Statistics figures go, government employment has declined only three other times. Once was in the recession of 1920-21, again in 1932-33, the first years of the Depression, and a third time in 1944-47, as World War II was ending and the nation was returning to a peacetime economy.

ALHOUGH the county might lack the immense culinarq diversity of Manhattan - in authentic Greek, Korean, Scandanavian, Thai, Brazilian or Russian, for examples - many county restaurants present charms unlikely or wholly impossible in the city. Few Westchester restaurants can boast the professional lambency and subtleties of an experienced dining room staff, but many here can and do offer a luxuriance of space and leisurely dining and, often enough, a gracious generosity of view. We have here many cheery hearths in 18th-century parlors, weddingcake Victorian verandas overlooking so many acres of verdant prospect, lakesides affording views of swift, silent sailboats, cliffs high above the Hudson ice floes, fishing coves that seem almost of another country - or eccentric sybaritic monuments (that must have seemed good ideas at the time) to accumulators of rail, steel, tobacco or Hollywood fortunes. It might be hard for us not to consider view or cheerful ambiance exclusively in our deciding upon not only the best restaurants in Westchester but also the ''plainer'' few that nevertheless have impressed us with their special efforts. But trying to concentrate on the quality of the food as much as the total dining experience, we proffer, then, generally in order of preference, our judgment of the best dining for the year now ending.

NEW JERSEY'S system of financing public education may be in trouble again. Two suits filed in Superior Court have attacked the constitutionality of the system, which was created in 1975. The current method of financing was set up by the Public School Education Act (known as the ''Thorough and Efficient,'' or ''T.& E.'' Law) after the State Supreme Court had invalidated the previous system. The suits, Abbott v. Burke and Sharif v. Byrne, charge that the prevailing method is still unconstitutional because it does not provide for state maintenance and support of a ''thorough and efficient system of free public schools,'' as mandated by the State Constitution. The T.& E. Law was enacted by the Legislature in response to the State Supreme Court's landmark 1973 ruling in Robinson v. Cahill. The court found that the relatively low level of state aid provided to local school districts, coupled with undue reliance on local property taxes to finance the balance of school expenditures, failed to satisfy the constitutional requirement because poorer school districts were unable to give their schools adequate support.

HARTFORD THE state is heading toward an $83 million budget deficit and as a result taxes will rise in a few weeks, most legislators agree. Even so, the details are almost as vague as they were five weeks ago, when the General Assembly began its special session to decide where the money would come from. The Finance, Revenue and Bonding Committee has approved a tax package that would cover three-quarters of the gap, but the package is primarily a vehicle for further discussion, according to some legislative leaders. The outlook now is that New Year's Day, the halfway mark in the fiscal year, will pass before the House -which must act first - even begins work on the taxes, reducing the time still available for budget cuts and tax increases. The session may last until the regular session begins in February, and the fiscal question could linger even longer.

It appears that even Dean Smith, the basketball coach at North Carolina who casts a ballot each week in the United Press International poll that ranks the nation's teams, will have to admit that the Tar Heels should be rated as the best. Although North Carolina has been ranked No.1 since the season started, it has not yet received Smith's vote. He would not say who had been getting his vote, just that it had not been Carolina. But after the 82-69 victory over second-ranked Kentucky this afternoon, a game that the Tar Heels controlled for the last 20 minutes, Smith would have a difficult time explaining a vote for anyone else.

HEMPSTEAD FOR almost two years, the $135 million Hempstead Resource Recovery plant has remained idle amid a continuing debate over its viability as a means of disposing of the town's growing mountain of garbage and charges that it poses a health hazard. Emissions from its tall smokestacks ceased in March 1980, when the plant was shut down after 12 months of operation in which it processed more than 320,000 tons of garbage, a record amount for its type of municipal plant in this country. Its private owners and operators, Parsons & Whittemore Inc., contend that the plant was performing its job as planned and that its emissions posed no threat to residents in the surrounding communities. Tests taken by the Federal Environmental Protection Avency in July 1979 had shown the presence of dioxin, a highly toxin carcinogen. This led to a growing chorus of public opposition and concern, not only in Hempstead, but across the country, where similar plants had been built or were in the planning and construction stages.

For 18 years, the Giants have waited to be in a playoff game. They will be there today when they oppose the Eagles at Veterans Stadium at Philadelphia in a wild-card game. The Eagles are old hands at playoff games. Last January, they were in the Super Bowl. This season, despite a four-game losing streak initiated by the Giants toward the end of the season, they finished with a 10-6 record. The Giants, who had not had a winning season for nine years, ended with a 9-7 record and barely made the playoffs. They won four of their last five games and the last three in a row, each time when a defeat would have wiped out their playoff dreams.

''When we get into next year,'' House Republican leader Robert H. Michel said of shaping the 1983 budget, ''it's going to be tougher than a son of a buck.'' At the White House last week, it already was. The Republican Party's fiscal and ideological fissures were no longer papered over by Ronald Reagan's easy election conquest last year. While legislators have been marching down to the White House to press their views on the merits and demerits of raising taxes to lower the mounting deficit, Presidential advisers have been circling about the Oval Office touting their respective economic analyses. Mr. Reagan, by all accounts, dug in his heels. When he had said in his press conference 10 days ago that he had ''no plans for increasing taxes in any way,'' apparently he meant it, just as earlier he had firmly ruled out cuts in defense spending.

WOODBRIDGE THE Rahway State Prison Lifers Group, whose Juvenile Awareness Project retreated almost into obscurity after winning national awards, is once more in center stage, thrust there by two publications. One publication says that the program works; the other says it does not. ''We can't get past the controversy,'' James Landano, president of the prisoners' group, complained. ''We keep getting bogged down in the same old rehashed baloney.''

Sears. RCA. Gulf and Western. National Steel. Baldwin United. Greyhound. General Electric. Control Data. Not to mention American Express, Merrill Lynch, Prudential, Beneficial and Transamerica. These are the bankers of today. And the list goes on. Need a loan? Want to make a deposit? Get a line of credit? Sign up for a credit card, an auto loan, a second mortgage, a first mortgage? Americans no longer need banks to satisfy their financial needs. Nor are the banks themselves ''just banks'' any more. They are, or are trying to be, go-go financial marketers. They prefer to call themselves ''financial services companies,'' just like the American Expresses and the Merrill Lynches. The banks are even finding ways around federal laws that prohibit them from engaging in certain activities or branching across state lines. Despite the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which bars commercial banks from many investment banking activities, the BankAmerica Corp. recently announced that it planned to buy Charles Schwab & Co., one of the nation's largest discount brokerage firms.