Please consider this Thursday Thoughts an open letter to help me find my lost ornaments!

The day after Thanksgiving is always decorating day in my home. Decorating for the first time in a new home always brings some challenges. Decorating for the first time with two toddlers to get into things adds extra challenges!

We live in a townhome so there wasn’t any outdoor decor to do, unfortunately. It was also raining all weekend (what?!) so the only outdoor space I do have freedom to decorate, our balcony, still hasn’t been tackled.

We did put up the tree, string it with lights, and waiting patiently for Treat to wake up from a long nap before pulling out the ornaments.

I opened up the box my husband brought up from the garage and handed Firecracker the first ornament of the year – a fun Auburn snowflake – which he happily put on the tree. I handed my husband Treat’s First Christmas Ornament from last year to assist the one year old in hanging.

As I dig further into the box I recognize that these ornaments are all from the Snowman Tree my family surprised me with 3 years ago. This box is not THE ornament box.

5-10 minutes passes and my husband comes back upstairs with a saddened expression. He can’t find the box. And he looked in every single box down there.

With a knot in my stomach and tears falling down my face I traced his footsteps and had to agree with his inventory check. It’s the hardest I’ve cried in a long time.

Ornaments spanning 6.5 years of married life, 2.5 years of parenthood were in that box. But those weren’t the ornaments giving me pain. I’ve already reordered Firecracker’s First Christmas Ornament. The ornaments that plague my dreams were those that had belonged to my grandfather, those that I had made as a child, those that my husband made as a kid.

It’s time now for my children to be the ornament makers and continue to make happy memories for us to relive every year we trim the tree.

My husband’s advent calendar that he loved a little boy was also in that box. We were looking forward to starting that tradition with the boys this year. My mother-in-law says she has extras from her mom though, so that heart-string didn’t get completely cut.

The silver lining, if I can find it, is that the cross-stitch stocking my grandfather started for me was not in the ornament box. My grandfather passed away in ’96 and my mom took it upon herself to complete the stocking. A task that took her over ten years, I’d finally received my stocking in 2012.  My husband also had a cross-stitch stocking from his childhood that I believe his mom did. Those two stockings are hanging by our fireplace. When it’s time to pull down the Christmas decorations following our final holiday season in CA, those stockings will not be boxed back up; they’ll be put with the other items we will move ourselves. (It’s a good thing our handmade stocking from my mother-in-law are down in Florida with my parents!)

My last hope is for a bit of Christmas magic. All I can do is cross my fingers and toes that some other family received our box of ornaments by mistake and that maybe they haven’t noticed it until they go to decorate their tree. I hope they contact the moving company and figure out a way to get a hold of us. I’m going to call and see if there’s some sort of Lost & Found at the storage facility where our things were held after arriving in the Los Angeles area. I know it’s a long shot, but had I discovered a box of some other family’s holiday memories I would do everything I could to try and find them.

If you have my box, the ornaments are stored using my DIY storage solution – check it out here! If you just want to get me the few I’m seriously missing I’d be forever thankful. There’s a balding styrofoam Santa with a beard, a cute little blue elf with knitted long orange hat, two Silver Bells from the year 2015, a flat foam gingerbread with pipe cleaner handle, and a laminated fingerprint reindeer.

Update: My mom scrolled through her phone’s photos and found this one from 2012 of our tree. That Santa head in the lower center is the one I really want back!!!