Yellow Pages
SEDRO-WOOLLEY — In the corner of Melissa Clementz’s first-floor apartment stands a Christmas tree adorned with small white lights and a set of brand new silver ornaments — the usual various-sized sparkly balls and corresponding snowflakes.
“It’s all icky and matchy,” Clementz said of her tree in disappointment. “I hate it.”
The tree is pretty enough, but all Clementz can see is what it’s missing — the ornaments her three boys made growing up and the collection of hand-picked ones she’s added every year. Someone stole all those.
In a story reminiscent of Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Clementz says a thief took off with a lifetime’s worth of holiday memories.
She doesn’t know when or why. All she knows is that when her husband looked in the locked storage closet in the hallway of their seven-unit apartment complex in downtown Sedro-Woolley last week, their three large tubs of Christmas ornaments were gone.
Clementz was at work at a Burlington grocery store Friday afternoon when her husband called to tell her the news. “All the ornaments are gone,” Michael Clementz told his wife, she recalled. “They’re not in the closet.”
A friend had just brought over a Christmas tree for the family. Clementz planned on decorating it that night with her youngest son.
Sedro-Woolley Police Chief Doug Wood said the department has no suspects or clues as to who stole the Clementz’ Christmas. Clementz said she doesn’t have any hard feelings with anyone and suspects whoever stole the tubs didn’t know what was in them.
After all, the thief left behind a collection of Nutcrackers and seven rolls of wrapping paper.
Clementz, a mother of three now-grown boys, 17, 19 and 22, had tears in her eyes as she described her missing decorations — an advent tree, Christmas lights, a plaster dinosaur her 17-year-old Corbin Tolar made as a young child and the dog ornament her boys bought her after their beagle named Bandit died.
“It’s just stuff like that,” Clementz said. “I can’t replace that stuff.”
Neighbors have tried to help, and came bearing extra ornaments when they heard of the Christmas tragedy in apartment No. 2.
This wasn’t the first time Clementz has been the victim of a theft. Someone stole a leaf blower from the same locked closet earlier this year.
“I can almost understand someone stealing something like that,” Clementz said. “I can’t understand someone hauling away three totes of Christmas stuff.”
Clementz said her oldest son was diagnosed with liver cancer in 2008. Though his health is good now after chemotherapy, his brush with cancer made Clementz treasure the things that remind her of him.
So her Christmas wish this year is that the person who stole her ornaments might have a change of heart, like the Grinch, and return them.
Clementz asks that they drop the ornaments off at her apartment complex, no questions asked, at 913 Third St. in Sedro-Woolley, behind Diamond Plaza.
Read more local news in the Skagit Valley Herald and the Anacortes American, or read it online in the E-edition
