THE LOOP — When a woman found a bag full of expensive Christmas ornaments on the ground in the Loop this week, she set out to create a small Christmas miracle by reuniting them with their owner.
It took only two days to do the job.
After a successful social media campaign, Kelly Bee on Thursday handed off the Christkindlmarket ornaments to a mother who had bought them for her baby’s first Christmas only to have them fall out of her stroller.
Bee noticed the white paper bag on the street when walking Tuesday afternoon near Dearborn and Van Buren streets. Inside were five glittering ornaments from the holiday market in Daley Plaza.
At first, Bee positioned the bag at the corner so nobody would throw it away and to make it visible in case the owner came back looking for it.
But when Bee walked by later that afternoon, the bag was still there.
“These glass ornaments are really expensive, so I felt bad for the one who lost them,” she said.
When no one picked them up, she took them home and posted on Twitter and Nextdoor to try to find the owner.
A few hours later, Stephani Ramijanc and her husband received a Nextdoor notification on their phone about Bee’s post.
“It was very random, because we don’t really use the app,” Ramijanc said.
She had lost the ornaments the day before, after meeting a friend at Christkindlmarket in Daley Plaza. The glass decorations were meant to celebrate her baby’s first Christmas, she said. She had put the paper bag underneath the stroller, Ramijanc said, but by the time she got home to the South Loop, it wasn’t there anymore.
“I even went on a drive trying to find the bag,” she said. “But I ended up just hoping that someone would at least find it and use the ornaments instead of accidentally smashing them.”
She connected with Bee, perfectly describing the five missing ornaments. The two women discovered they lived near each other and met Thursday at a local Trader Joe’s to reunite Ramijanc with the special ornaments.
“We got our little holiday miracle,” joked Bee.
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