If an estate sale is truly an ESTATE sale, the entire contents of a deceased person’s house are on offer. Shopping at such a sale is not unlike the experience of browsing in a department store (back before online shopping made department stores nearly obsolete). Everything one might need is available: furniture, pots, pans, china, bed linens, towels, ladies’ fashions (on the second floor, usually), menswear, books, records . . . and holiday decorations.

Who’s in the mood for Christmas in July? Hardly anybody—but this time of year, it’s fun to come across Christmas things. I am at this moment kicking myself for passing up the chance yesterday to buy, very cheaply, enough twinkly white lights to festoon a whole forest of Christmas trees. The owners of this particular house appeared to have stockpiled spares of anything and everything. In the basement, I found boxes and boxes of the lights, unopened.

I passed them up because I’ve actually been trying to give away my surplus Christmas tree ornaments, lest when I’m gone I leave behind a house so full of things that people shake their heads and murmur, “The poor thing never threw anything away.” We have twinkly lights, enough strings to make our tree very twinkly, but they are multicolored lights.

I always liked the twinkly white ones better, but our son loved the colored ones and Christmas is for children, so that’s what we had. He’s grown up and living in Brooklyn now, though, so we could have twinkly white lights if we wanted.

The collections of Christmas-themed items vary from house to house. I’ve browsed drawers full of festive tablecloths and napkins, dish towels and oven mitts featuring Santa, holly, Christmas trees, gingerbread men . . . Sometimes there are whole sets of china whose designs make it clear they are season-specific. I’ve come across boxes and boxes of ornaments, sometimes painstakingly handmade—styrofoam balls embellished with sequins, or tiny crocheted wreaths and Santas. Elaborate Christmas stockings are another frequent find, knit or crocheted or needlepoint or sewn from felt, sometimes large enough for a dandyish giant to wear.

The objects seem inert, even forlorn—often relegated to misshapen cardboard boxes in a dusty basement, layered in among unrelated items like old T-shirts, sneakers, sad dolls. But they meant something to somebody once. Somebody stood in a shop and stared at an assortment of boxed ornaments, trying to picture the effect of red or gold or silver against the boughs of a live tree. Those stockings dangled from a mantel every year. The linen tablecloth with the meticulously embroidered evergreen wreath border was spread on the dining room table, with extra leaves added to accommodate a crowd. The Christmas tree in the center of that huge oval platter was hidden by a turkey.

I’ve even bought Christmas cards, sensing a kindred spirit in the homeowner seduced by an appealing design into buying yet another box of cards. Partial boxes accumulate and the supply is never exhausted, but now those partial boxes are part of my accumulation. And lest, with such an assortment to choose from, I send the same card to the same person, I keep a list of who got which card when. Meticulous as that seems (who would actually notice or care if they got the same card from the same person two years in a row?) I’m not the only person to do this. I’ve come across such lists among the boxes of cards left behind by the departed whose estates I’ve browsed.

Truly, they and I were sisters under the skin and I hope they had many merry Christmases.

Happy holidays to all!