This is not a picture of the family’s tree. Unfortunately, they don’t have any that clearly show their lost ornaments. (iStock)
Kelly Hendry Cotting wasn’t sure where else to turn for help, so earlier this week, she logged on to Craigslist and started typing.
“Christmas Ornaments-Accidentally donated,” she wrote.
Maybe strangers could help her find them, she thought. The ornaments had been collected over her parents’ 25-plus years of marriage, and they marked moments and memories. They were meant to be handed down for generations, not given away.
She kept typing.
In her Craigslist post, she explained how they had become lost. Her father had recently moved out of his house, and an organizer helping him had accidentally donated the ornaments to a thrift store in Maryland.
She also explained why the family so badly wanted them back: Her mother had died years earlier.
“If we could find even a few of them,” Cotting wrote, “I would love to buy them back and would be happy to pay a finders fee for your troubles.”
[9 years after being flushed, woman’s wedding ring reappears]
I saw Cotting’s post by chance and reached out to her to see whether anyone had responded. No one had.
Her father told her it was okay, not to worry about finding the ornaments. That’s what dads say, after all.
But she could tell it bothered him because he kept bringing it up.
“I should have been more careful,” he told her. “I should have kept more of an eye on them.”
Cotting, a lawyer, said she does not have “high hopes” the family will get back all — or even most — of the holiday decorations they lost, but she would feel grateful to find even a few. She could give them to her dad for Christmas.
“It would mean more than anything I could buy for him,” she said. “He just said goodbye to the house. I think he now feels he lost a piece of her.”
Cotting is not sure her dad would want attention brought to him, and so I am not identifying him beyond his age, 64.
The family believes the ornaments probably were lost a few months ago, when he cleaned out the Maryland house he had shared with his wife since 1992. He wanted to live closer to Cotting and her son, his first grandchild, so he moved to Richmond.
Two weeks ago, the family realized the ornaments, stored in a red and green bin, hadn’t made the move.
They searched and made calls, and they now believe they were donated to Savers on Joppa Road in Parkville, in Baltimore County. The family has talked to employees at the shop, and the ornaments, of course, are no longer there.
This is where you come in.
Cotting needs your help finding them. Someone bought them from that Savers. Maybe it was you, or maybe it was a Facebook friend of a Facebook friend of yours. Maybe, just maybe, a family in the Washington region has a glass French horn with gold accents hanging from their tree and has no idea how much Cotting’s family would love it back.
Many of the lost ornaments were instruments because Cotting’s mother was a classically trained French horn player. She was also an elementary schoolteacher. Cotting said her mother enjoyed teaching music to children so much that she continued to do it for years as she battled breast cancer, stopping only months before her death in September 2009.
“She always said, ‘There is a kid out there, and they might not be good at math and science, but they will be good at music,’ ” Cotting said. “That meant a lot to her, that she gave them something they could be proud of.”
Some of the lost ornaments came from those students. At least one read, “World’s best teacher.”
[White House Christmas decorations through the years]
Cotting searched for photos but found only a few, and none showed the ornaments clearly. I asked her to try to remember as many details about them as possible. It’s a hard task. Try to think back to your own childhood home, and you realize there are things you value but don’t commit to memory because you assume they will always be there.
She and her brother, Rob Hendry, worked together to come up with a list, and this is what they recall hanging from their childhood tree:
A blue rocking horse with the words, “Baby’s first Christmas.”
A puppy with black dots in a stocking that Cotting painted to match the family dog when she was in third grade. A big red ribbon adorned it.
A Santa in an Orioles uniform.
A cat sewn from white and orange fabric.
A White House ornament from 1995.
A red cartoon-looking bird with a green scarf.
Among the other lost decorations were a wooden angel tree topper that may have come from UNICEF, a set of three foam snowmen with red knitted scarves and hats and two stockings that were sewn by Cotting’s maternal grandmother. One featured a snowman with a bell and read, “Kelly.” The other showed a bear on a rocking horse and read, “Rob.”
If you have seen any of them, please email me at theresa.vargas@washpost.com.
The family is hoping for a Christmas miracle. Cotting said she had planned to one day pass down the ornaments to her son. He is 9 months old and never got to meet his grandmother.
“It’s important to me,” she said. “He won’t know her, but I want him to have pieces of her.”
