Newtown visitors spread holiday spirit
Well-wishers from around the country gather in town.
NEWTOWN, CONN. — Newtown celebrated Christmas amid piles of snow-covered teddy bears, long lines of stockings and heaps of flowers as volunteers manned a 24-hour candlelight vigil in memory of the 20 children and six educators gunned down at an elementary school just 11 days before the holiday.
Well-wishers from around the country showed up Christmas morning to hang ornaments on a series of memorial Christmas trees while police officers from around the state took extra shifts to direct traffic, patrol the town and give police here a break.
“It’s a nice thing that they can use us this way,” Ted Latiak, a police detective from Greenwich, Conn., said Christmas morning, as he and a fellow detective, each working a half-day shift, came out of a store with bagels and coffee for other officers.
The expansive memorials throughout town have become gathering places for residents and visitors alike. A steady stream of residents, some in pajamas, relit candles that had been extinguished in an overnight snow storm. Others took pictures, dropped off toys and fought back tears at a huge sidewalk memorial in the center of Newtown’s Sandy Hook section that is filled with stuffed animals, poems, flowers, posters and cards.
In the morning, Newtown resident Joanne Brunetti watched over 26 candles that had been lit at midnight in honor of those slain at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
“People have been wonderful to everybody in Newtown whether you were part of what happened or not,” she said. “My thought is if we were all this nice to each other all the time maybe things like this wouldn’t happen.”
At a town hall memorial, Faith Leonard waved to people driving by and handed out Christmas cookies, children’s gifts and hugs to anyone who needed it.
“I guess my thought was if I could be here helping out maybe one person would be able to spend more time with their family or grieve in the way they needed to,” said Leonard, who drove to Newtown from Gilbert, Ariz., to volunteer on Christmas morning alone.
Julian Revie played “Silent Night” on a piano on the sidewalk at the downtown memorial. Revie, from Ottawa, Canada, was in the area visiting at the time of the shootings. He cancelled his plans to go to Australia, found a piano online and chose to spend Christmas Eve and Christmas Day playing for the people of Newtown.
“It was such a mood of respectful silence,” said Revie. “But yesterday being Christmas Eve and today being Christmas Day, I thought now it’s time for some Christmas carols for the children.”