One of my favorite holiday stories is “Good Housekeeping,” a Bailey White public radio commentary from some years back. It’s about White’s comic struggle to clean up her elderly mother’s house for Thanksgiving, a challenge complicated by the elder White’s passion for saving everything.

Over the course of an exhausting weekend, the house slowly surrenders its strange keepsakes, which include a turtle skull, “some deadly appliances from the early days of electricity, and an old mechanical milking machine with attachments for only three teats.”

I don’t think of myself as a pack rat in the White family tradition, although hoarders rarely recognize their worst tendencies. All of this came to mind as Thanksgiving approached this year and nudged me to look around our own house with fresh eyes.

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