When Lyndsey Harvey put her two-year-old daughter to bed on Halloween, she left a salad bowl outside the front door filled with sweets.
To try and prevent trick-or-treaters from ringing the bell and waking her child up, the 29-year-old marketing consultant left a note: “Sorry, baby asleep. But please help yourself to a treat. Happy Halloween!”
Unfortunately somebody seemed to think that gave them free reign to take the beautiful salad bowl too, which held sentimental value to Harvey and her husband as it was a John Lewis wedding gift costing £80.
“I put our trick-or-treat sweets in that bowl because it was the only big one I had that was clean,” Harvey, who lives in Salisbury, tells HuffPost UK.
Harvey had spent about an hour with her toddler giving out sweets to local kids, but when it was bedtime she didn’t want any more interruptions. She popped the bowl by the front door with the note, but was a little surprised when the doorbell went 10 minutes later. She opened the door to find everything had been taken – the sweets and the expensive salad bowl.
“I was gutted, mostly because I felt silly for being so trusting,” she says. “But I’d had a ridiculously long day at work including about 100 miles of driving and just didn’t think.”
That night, the disappointed 29-year-old took to Twitter to explain what happened and asked people to keep an eye out for her bowl – and things escalated pretty quickly.
Next thing she knew, Harvey received a tweet from John Lewis asking what type of bowl it was. Their social media manager later tweeted saying they would replace her beloved item.
“I never thought John Lewis would get in touch, but it was so lovely that they did,” Harvey says. “A replacement turned up with their local store manager this morning.
“It was such a lovely gesture that I really didn’t expect and cheered me up after a lot of nasty comments on Twitter [people questioned why she left the bowl outside in the first place]. I’m glad people got a bit of a laugh out of it though.”