My reason for writing to the editor is two fold. First, I would like to publicly express gratitude to a person we didn’t even know who reached out to us when my wife and I were devastated by the loss of our house to fire. Second, to share the brief story of how her gift that may have seemed insignificant at the time 13 months later made our Christmas very real.

On Nov. 16, 2006, we had a typical rural Woodinville power outage as the result of a wind and rainstorm.

As I left our dark house on the way to work the following morning, I remember the PSE crew just arriving to work on the problem.

I waved and gave them a thumbs-up gesture. When the power was restored it caused an unexpectedly strong power-surge causing a fire at our breaker box that quickly engulfed the rest of the house.

We were not home at the time. The fire took half of our house before Woodinville’s finest could get there, blocked by the down power lines in the street.

We lost a beloved dog and approximately 80 percent of our possessions. We were in shock as well as saddened beyond belief at how quickly our lives had changed.

A day later I received a cell phone call from a woman who said she lived a mile beyond our house in the Lexington housing tract. Her name is Lana (forgive me if I didn’t spell your name correctly). She said she felt terrible driving past our burned out house and wanted to know what she could do for us.

My wife and I were still in shock and dealing with a thousand details related to the aftermath.

I responded that we were fine, had good insurance, and that we were being taken care of, but thank you for your concern.

She called back a few days later saying that she really wanted to do something and had taken up a collection in her neighborhood and would like to present us with what she had accumulated on our behalf.

Her friends and neighbors had contributed gift certificates, food, clothes, blankets etc.

With all the chaos of the million details, and Thanksgiving a few days away we were unable to coordinate to meet her personally to receive this bounty, but had it left on the front porch of our burned out residence. I called to thank her and she checked up on us a couple of weeks later, but I have since in all the moving and temporary residences lost her phone number.

In that care package was a home-made jar that consisted of all the dry ingredients for making holiday cookies. Needless to say we were not feeling all that festive that holiday season, and making cookies was not high on our list of priorities. But we moved it with us to the Residence Inn where we stayed through the next storms, and then to a temporary long-term residence on Redmond Ridge where we still reside today.

The house started to get rebuilt in November, held up by more storms, fire investigations, licensing and permit hassles.

In August I lost my teaching job, but looked at it as an opportunity to help move the rebuild along.

However, this made money very tight. A month or so later we had a falling out with our only local family, so we found ourselves at the short end of another bleak holiday.

Christmas day I was looking through a cabinet for a snack and came across that jar of holiday cookie mix.

I was overcome with a myriad of emotions. The strongest of those emotions was of gratitude to Lana, the neighbor we never met who cared so much that she insisted on doing something to soften the blow of all that we had lost.

My wife and I preheated the oven to 350 degrees, threw the mix into a large bowl, added the butter, egg and vanilla and made two dozen cookies while the snow fell lightly outside.

The symbolic gesture of that cookie mix over a year later made us realize how fortunate we really were, and how the kindness of one stranger made our Christmas day so much brighter.

Lana, if you read this, please contact The Woodinville Weekly with your contact information. My wife and I would love to come by and thank you personally for your awesome gesture of kindness and support.

I would also like to express gratitude to the woman who was driving past our house and saw a firefighter carrying two of our cats. We had yet to arrive at the scene. She volunteered to take care of them until we could get settled. I assure you if the opportunity, God forbid, ever arises we will do the same.

Thank you!