Emma Lorber found these French horn ornaments at a Parkville, Md., store where the Hendry family’s ornaments were donated. She hopes these might belong to the Hendrys. (Emma Lorber)
Jackie Freeburger was reading my column about a family who lost their Christmas ornaments, feeling sympathy for them, when she noticed a familiar name.
That’s when it hit her. She had given an ornament to the family years earlier.
Freeburger was a fifth grader at the time and her music teacher was Diane Hendry. Hendry was a classically trained French horn player and the type of educator who believed music gave children who might not excel in other subjects a chance to find their strength.
Freeburger can’t recall what was on the ornament she gave her teacher, but she remembers why she felt it was important to give her something.
That year, Hendry helped Freeburger find her talent for the bass clarinet and, although neither knew it then, it would eventually lead Freeburger to where she is now: teaching music to students in the same school system.
“I don’t think without her I would have found that passion for music that she instilled in all of us,” Freeburger, now 32, said. “She was a very special lady and a phenomenal teacher.”
Ornaments are objects in only the most basic sense. Really, they are also vessels for nostalgia, a collection of memories and moments. We choose which ones to keep and hang based on what we don’t want to forget.
On Hendry’s family tree, there was an ornament that marked a first Christmas and one that was painted by hand to resemble the family dog. There were many ornaments that reflected hobbies and passions, including instruments, cats and a Santa in an Orioles uniform. One said “world’s best teacher.”
And two weeks ago, the family realized all of them were gone.
[Have you seen this family’s Christmas ornaments? They were accidentally donated.]
They had been stored in a red and green bin, and the family believes it was accidentally donated to a thrift store in Maryland a few months ago. They searched and made calls and after they ran out of options, Hendry’s daughter Kelly Hendry Cotting turned to Craigslist to ask for the public’s help in finding them.
In her post, she wrote about how the ornaments had been collected over her parents’ 25-plus years of marriage and how she hoped to find “at least a few” of them.
She also touched on why it was so important to the family: Diane Hendry had died years earlier of breast cancer.
I saw Cotting’s post and, in hopes of helping the family get the ornaments back, wrote about their efforts .
What has happened in the days since has been incredible to witness.
Strangers have offered to share their own family’s ornaments. About a dozen people wrote saying they wanted to buy or give the family a specific White House ornament that had been among the ones lost.
One person may have even found a few that belonged to the family.
When Emma Lorber read that the family’s decorations had been donated to a Savers in Parkville, she reached out to her mom, who shops there frequently. Her mom searched and found a set of five gold French horns.
Lorber sent me a picture of them spread across a pink blanket.
“We’re wondering if they look familiar, and would gladly give them back!” she wrote.
I sent the picture to Cotting. She said she didn’t recognize them but couldn’t be sure they weren’t her family’s ornaments. She planned to ask her father after Christmas.
Until then, she was trying to keep the effort a secret from him. She could tell the loss bothered him. The family believes the ornaments were donated by an organizer who helped him clear out his Maryland house a few months ago when he moved to Richmond to live closer to Cotting and her son, his first grandchild.
Cotting had hoped to recover a few so she could give them to him as a Christmas present.
Just in case though, she ordered a 1995 White House ornament on eBay to match the one that had been on their tree.
She planned to wrap that in a box and give it to him — along with Freeburger’s email. Freeburger sent the email when she realized the ornament she gave Hendry might be among the lost collection.
In it, she described Hendry as an “inspiration” to her and said she wanted to send the family a new ornament.
“The last time I saw her was my college senior recital,” she wrote. “She passed the same month I followed in her footsteps and became a music teacher.”
What Freeburger didn’t write, but told me later, was how two months after the death, a cart arrived in her Baltimore County class filled with trumpets for the students to try. She opened it and found that Hendry was still guiding her. Hendry had left a handwritten note to let the next teacher know that some of the trumpet’s valves needed to be fixed.
Cotting said if the ornaments Lorber found don’t turn out to be her family’s, and even if they don’t find any at all, she is grateful for what came of her search.
“If the only thing that comes out of this is more people are talking about how awesome my mom is and her legacy, that makes me happy,” she said. “When you lose somebody, the only thing you want is to remember the world is a better place because they were in it and you’re not the only person who is carrying those memories.”
