Man finds his childhood jacket after 24 years while shopping for his kid at thrift store

Imagine finding something from your childhood that holds great importance in your life, but you thought it might have been lost forever. This is exactly what happened to a man named Eli Yarian. The man from Alaska—who goes by @dad.tats on TikTok—posted a slideshow of three pictures, which summed up the heartwarming story of discovering a long-lost childhood item. While shopping for his newborn son, Yarian came across his childhood denim jacket at a thrift store.

He then shared a carousel post of himself as a kid while wearing the jacket way back in 1994. It still has his name on the inside, which his mother had written on the label of the denim wear. The audience on TikTok was so touched by the story that they even started demanding it be turned into a Levi's denim jacket commercial. The video which was posted on December 2, 2023, has raked up millions of views so far and featured an adorable picture of Yarian and his brother sporting matching denim jackets in Tennessee.

“My brother and I in Tennessee circa 1994 wearing our new matching denim jackets,” the overlay text on the video read. Two decades later, Yarian's wife stumbled upon an oddly familiar jacket at an Alaskan thrift shop. “The same jacket from the picture,” he wrote in the video about the Strauss & Co. denim wear, “We were shopping for our first son when she saw my last name written on the tag in my mom’s handwriting and screamed.”

The label of the jacket showed the name "Yarian" scribbled on the tag and the last photo on the TikTok slideshow captured Yarian's son wearing the same jacket and looking dapper in it. “The weirdest part might have been that your mom gave me the little knit hat that you’re wearing in the photo only a few days before I found the jacket,” Yarian's wife noted in the comment section and TikTok users have been dropping their jaws ever since.

@anfl768 shared: "I saw a girl in Amsterdam with a pink jacket. I told her mom I used to have a jacket exactly like hers. Her mom said there was a name written on the jacket. She asked for my name and we found out that it was my old jacket. 27 years later." @randy_floyd420 joked: "Two friends and I wrote our initials on a dollar spent it on one end of town got it back as change like 3 hours later on the other side of town."

@coconocat quipped: "I found a scrapbook in an antique store of a WW2 soldier's letters and photos and in one of the letters was a detailed description of my grandfather." @moth__meat added: "My family once walked into a random restaurant and they had lots of random pictures and one was of my dad in the high school band and we got to take it home." These sweet reunion stories of people with their age-old belongings are always heartwarming, just like in another case, a woman discovered her family heirloom at her client's house.

A woman named Annie Cunningham thought that an artwork that used to be her family heirloom would never be found again after it disappeared 20 years ago. However, she accidentally discovered it at a house she was cleaning. Cunningham, who works at Tidy Casa, arrived to clean Ryleigh Gleason's Tempe home two weeks ago and she was in for a surprise. The heirloom was a stitched piece of art that her grandmother initially made for her parents. Following her father's tumultuous estate administration after his demise, the art piece was lost.

“I was probably in the kitchen for about half an hour and then I looked up and saw a picture hanging on the wall, by the cabinet,” Cunningham told ABC 15 Arizona and after taking a closer look, she immediately recalled it from her childhood. “I remembered seeing it sitting on my parents' gold velvet couch, with green shag carpet, in front of the Zenith console that we had, that was the vinyl player, the TV installed in it and that picture being up on the wall above it," she said.