To me, yard sales are one of the hallmarks of summer. I truly enjoy spending a nice Saturday morning going from sale to sale looking for bargains and checking out other people’s stuff.

My son and daughter, their families and myself, of course, started planning to have a three-family yard sale this summer. We would set a date, but due to one conflict or another with one of the family members the sale had to be postponed over and over.

Finally we pulled it all together.

In the weeks leading up to the big event I started going through stuff to decide what I could part with and how much I was willing to part with it for.

That might be a simple task for some people, but it was no simple matter for me. I won’t go so far as to say that I’m a hoarder, but I do seem to accumulate a lot of stuff, and if I really wanted to part with it I wouldn’t have accumulated it in the first place.

But in the interest of family unity and a desire to make a few dollars I bit the proverbial bullet and packed up a whole bunch of stuff. Stuff that I thought yard sale shoppers would go gaga over, especially if it was reasonably priced.

On sale day as we were putting the merchandise out two things happened. First was to discover things that you didn’t know each other had and you absolutely, positively wanted to have.

Well, family is family so if there was anything one of us wanted then of course we could have it, so that eliminated about 10 percent of the sale items we originally had.

The second thing to happen was to discover just how many of the sale items were gifts we had given each other for various birthdays and Christmases past.

To see a precious gift that I had put a lot of thought and a fair amount of money into on a table with a $1 or $2 price tag really made me stop and think. Either I don’t know my kids’ taste as well as I thought I did or they are greedier than I realized.

I eventually got over it, especially when one of my grandsons questioned me about a candleholder that he was pretty sure he gave me two Christmases ago. I removed it from the table and hung my head in shame.

Then the people came and things started to sell and we started to wonder what other gifts we had that we could part with without hurting anyone’s feelings.

If you think people who go to yard sales are predictable then you’re wrong. Items that I thought were way under priced and very useful and was sure would go in a hurry just sat there all day with very little interest. Other stuff that I had actually considered throwing away got snatched up like 50-cent hamburgers at Burger King.

My son turned out to be quite the wheeler-dealer and seemed to really enjoy haggling with people. My daughter and I, on the other hand, were easy marks and would take whatever was offered.

I was amazed at how many people came to our yard sale, and I was also amazed at how many people pulled up, looked from the vehicles and then drove away. I assume they were looking for something particular and didn’t see it or maybe it was because we were looking at them and grinning from ear to ear like a bunch of vultures that caused them to drive away.

We really did have a good yard sale and we all made some money and got rid of a lot of stuff to boot. We spent some quality time with each other and ended the day with a family cookout. All in all, it was a great day and we decided that we all had enough stuff to have another sale in a few weeks. I’m looking forward to that and I do have a lot more stuff that I can part with. But the way I see it, I have one particular candleholder that certainly won’t end up in the sale.