I find the idea that the OP’s computer science background was a “help” hilarious. I’m sure those he was helping sort Christmas decorations with are all wondering how they ever managed to do it in the past, alone, without the Christmas miracle of sorting algorithms...
Ah! Clojure's persistent vectors: https://hypirion.com/musings/understanding-persistent-vector...
I would use stacks to sort. The book was about 1000 pages? I'll do about 10 stacks. Then figuring out which stack to put a given page in is fast. (Abstract this and you wind up with a binary tree, which is what made me think of the persistent vectors above.)
This is often the most efficient way to sort physical items when you have a constrained range and working space, without custom equipment.
And yes, it really helps to know about variants like the American Flag Sort to realize that you can mix and match algorithm properties. AFS is an in-place sort, which is horribly inefficient for physical objects, but the observation that you can do a radix sort in MSD order is a refreshing additional observation vs "radix sort is always LSD first" the way card sorters work.
Computer science isn't directly applicable because we generally deal with general purpose algorithms, but I wonder how often their work is applicable to us, how often could we see huge improvements by using a specialized for the purpose sorting algorithm?