In 1970, 17-year-old Sandra Hicks got pregnant and made the difficult decision to give up her baby for adoption. Now, more than 50 years after she said goodbye, she’s reunited with her child.

“I didn’t feel like I had a choice back then,” Hicks, now Sandra Hicks Weeden, told ABC15, recounting that, after learning she was pregnant, she moved from her native Alaska to a maternity home in Washington, where she gave birth to a baby girl.

“I got to hold her for just 30 minutes,” she remembered. “I got to count her fingers and her toes and then they took her away.”

In the 52 years it’s been since she gave her baby up for adoption, Weeden never forgotten her firstborn.

“Never ever. This time of year, around Thanksgiving time, I would go through a sadness. I can’t explain it but my heart would be so sad,” she said.

The adoption was closed, so Weeden didn’t know where her daughter lived. All that changed earlier this year, when she got a notification on her ancestry.com account. It was Weeden’s granddaughter, who she didn’t know existed, and who was doing some research on her background.

“I was at a loss for words because I couldn’t believe I actually located my mom’s biological mother,” Azhia-Lin Thompson, Weeden’s granddaughter, told ABC15.

Thompson, crying, brought the news to her mother, Heidi Lynn Wallace.

“I was like, ‘Who do I need to beat up?’ and she’s like, ‘I think I found your birth mother,’ and I said, ‘Um what?!” Wallace told ABC15.

Wallace and Weeden first spoke on FaceTime.

“I ended up crying for the next three days,” Wallace said.

The pair finally met over Christmas weekend in Mesa, Arizona. It was a meeting both had been waiting for for 53 years.

“Pulling up to her house, I was hyperventilating,” Wallace said.

According to the family, they connected quickly over their love of music. They even decided to work on their own version of “This Christmas” for next year.

“I’m putting it together where I’m going to have all the family members sing parts of the song and then instruments in between,” Wallace’s newfound brother, Marcus, told ABC15.

Wallace told the outlet that reconnecting with Weeden has been life-altering.

“I don’t have a new chapter, I’ve got a whole new book now,” she said. “This is the ultimate Christmas gift.”