Placards, posters and a whiteboard refashion Christmas decorations into memorials

12-14-12 — the date of the Sandy Hook massacre is inescapable in these parts.

As this picturesque community grieves for the 26 lives lost at the local elementary school, 20 of them young children, makeshift memorials have sprung up on every corner.

In many instances, what were holiday decorations have been spontaneously refashioned. At the fire station near the school building is a row of Christmas trees dressed not with festive baubles but toys and white flowers of mourning.

In the centre of Sandy Hook, overlooking a babbling brook, stands the tallest of the holiday monuments-turned-memorials: a towering Christmas conifer surrounded by an ever-growing assortment of mementos.

Placards and posters, many emblazoned with the date of the killings, are massed around its base, along with candles. Perhaps the most touching memorial is the new whiteboard, a reminder of the once-safe classrooms up the hilly road.

As the rest of the country begins yet another conversation about gun control, here at the site of the killings people are still in shock. They will no doubt have their say, but for now they are still coming to terms with what happened on Friday.

Take Sasha Nguyen. She was at the giant Christmas tree on Sunday night. Once a student of the slain principal Dawn Hochsprung, she was still in a state of disbelief. Before she took over at Sandy Hook, Mrs Hochsprung was an assistant principal at a middle school in the next town. Ms Nguyen was, in her own words, “a problematic teen” and often ended up in Mrs Hochsprung’s office. They became well acquainted and ran into each other just a couple of months ago. They exchanged numbers and, as is often the way, lost touch ­— until Friday, when Ms Nguyen heard of the killings.

Newtown has a population of under 30,000, of which the affluent community of Sandy Hook is a small slice. The size of such a community means most locals either had a direct connection with the shootings or know someone who did.

Yesterday a resident who lives across the Newtown street from the funeral home where the service for six-year-old Jack Pinto was held spoke of how she didn’t know the children, but had been acquainted with some of the adults gunned down by Adam Lanza.

There is a risk here of resorting to the louche panache of the usual clichés, of labelling Newtown as a close-knit community, a small place with a big heart that has been wounded by Lanza’s gun. But that is only because within every cliché there is the gnawing ring of truth.