A Central Texas family is hoping for a holiday miracle after a storage unit sale lost them decades of family memories.
AXTELL, Texas — For Katie Mills and her family, Christmas has always been their biggest celebration of the year—a time to come together, share stories and honor their loved ones.
“Christmas is our favorite holiday,” Mills said. “It’s like the biggest one we do. We go all out every year for Christmas.”
But this holiday season, something precious is missing. Among the ornaments that traditionally adorned the family’s tree was one that held special significance: a keepsake honoring Gabrielle, Mills’ older sister who died at just three weeks old, more than two decades ago.
“Gabrielle was my sister,” Mills explained. “She was an infant. She died at 3 weeks in the hospital. She was a little fighter and she fought really hard until she passed away.”
Though Mills never got to meet Gabrielle, she’s come to know her sister through family photos and stories from her parents.
When Gabrielle died, the funeral home gifted Mills’ parents a memorial ornament. For years, it became the foundation of a family tradition.
“It’s a tradition that it’s the first ornament that goes back on the tree every year,” Mills said. “It goes front and center every year.”
The ritual symbolized more than holiday decorating—it represented the family’s resilience and love.
“It almost kind of in a way tells me the strength of my family when they stood by each other’s side and managed to get through it,” Mills reflected.
Earlier this year, Mills learned that a storage unit containing her family’s Christmas ornaments—including Gabrielle’s—had been sold after an unpaid bill.
“I found out that the unit had actually been sold in January, but we didn’t know until months later, when it was far too late to try and go get them,” Mills told 6 News.
A family member who had offered to store the ornaments didn’t realize the bill hadn’t been paid, and by the time the Mills family found out, their treasured collection was gone.
“Yeah, they’re all gone,” Mills said sadly.
The loss includes generations of family history—ornaments that are 30, 40 and 50 years old, each with its own story, but it’s Gabrielle’s ornament that hurts the most.
“It’s been well over 20 years since she passed, and they just didn’t have any other things that were hers,” Mills said.
For Mills’ mother, the loss has been devastating.
“I think my mom was just more so—it was kind of in a way like she felt like she lost her again,” Mills said. “She said that ‘I don’t want to put up decorations.’ It just kind of feels like they’ve lost the Christmas spirit.”
As a parent herself, Mills understands the profound grief.
“As a parent myself, I can’t imagine losing my child and then losing like the one last little thing that we had of hers,” Mills said.
Mills had hoped to one day pass the ornament down to her own daughter, continuing the tradition of honoring Gabrielle’s memory.
“I was hoping that that was something that my daughter will hopefully get to see and at one point we’ll get to put on our tree down the line,” she said.
Now, Mills is reaching out to the community, hoping someone might have purchased the storage unit contents or know where the ornaments ended up. The funeral home that created Gabrielle’s ornament has since closed, making a replacement impossible.
“At the very least I’d like to find Gabby’s, but you know, best thing is we find all of them and we can go back and continue still building off of our tree but keep the memories and part of our family history that’s been passed down from generations,” Mills said.
Mills is even willing to pay whoever may have ended up with the ornament.
“She was on this earth for a very brief amount of time, but we want to make sure that her memory doesn’t fade,” Mills said of Gabrielle. “We use our Christmas tree as a way to tell stories of our family. And so especially with hers, we don’t really have too many other tangible items that were hers. It’s just our way of honoring her.”
Mills’ goal is simple but heartfelt: restore her family’s Christmas spirit.
“My goal is to hopefully find it and kind of give that back to my family, especially because it is the one thing that we really go the extra mile for every year—to be together as a family and to celebrate Christmas,” Mills said.
If you have any information about the Mills family ornaments or purchased items from a storage unit that may have contained Christmas decorations, please contact 6 News.