BLUE CHRISTMAS: Madonna Badger this week walks around Doi Saket, Thailand, where she had hoped to give gifts to orphans.
DOI SAKET, Thailand — She traveled half the world in search of some peace — but still hasn’t found it.
Madonna Badger, whose three young daughters died in last year’s horrific Christmas Day fire in Connecticut, journeyed to this remote corner of Thailand to visit orphaned girls and give them the very toys her children were supposed to find under their tree.
But she never made her planned trip to the orphanage on the anniversary.
“It’s so hard right now,” Badger had told The Post Saturday as she strolled near Breanna’s House of Joy orphanage in Doi Saket.
“Last night was the hardest yet. I cried and cried. I couldn’t stop crying.”
Then Badger, 48, began weeping anew.
She said she has been “trying to heal” by traveling to the orphanage, which was founded by missionaries from Colorado near the major city of Chiang Mai.
Badger, who arrived on Dec. 8 to the Tao Garden holistic resort with a friend, said she chose a charity in Thailand in part because yuletide in Asia was likely to be much more low key than Christmas in Connecticut.
For one thing, there would be no one dressed up like Santa Claus, she reasoned.
Her father had been working as a department-store Santa — his “dream job’’ — right before he and her mother were killed, along with her children, in the Stamford house blaze.
Badger also hoped to escape the usual holiday festivities that would only serve to remind her of her beautiful, joyful girls — 9-year-old Lily and 7-year-old twins Grace and Sarah.
But reminders of her unspeakable loss were everywhere, especially when she visited the orphanage. There, 44 girls, ages 6 to 20, live together in modest white houses with brown-tile roofs across from a rice paddy.
When she went there for the first time three days before Christmas, she braced herself as she saw a banner proclaiming the message “Merry Christmas” over the entrance to the main house.
But the courageous mom went in anyway and met with the children, who are from the impoverished hill tribes of northern Thailand.
“These are very high-risk girls,” Badger said. “A lot of their parents sold them.
“I painted with them, and they played music.”
Then, she added excitedly, “I’m going with them to church tomorrow.”
But when that day came, and orphanage workers came to pick her up, Badger was unable to bring herself to go with the girls, many of whom are around the same age as her daughters.
“She said that when she . . . saw the children, she was overwhelmed and cried the entire day,” said Badger’s lawyer, Frank Corso, who spoke to her on Christmas Eve.
Still, “through prayer, she was able to find the strength to help them [at other times] and appreciate that they had suffered more than she had in their short lives,” Corso said.
But even back at the resort, Badger found little solace.
Tao Garden staffers put up Christmas lights throughout the peaceful grounds and adorned the dining halls with colorful tinsel.
They even put up a Christmas tree topped with Santa Claus ornaments.
Badger gasped audibly when she went to dinner and for the first time saw the tree and its shimmering decorations.
“I came here because I wanted a Santa-free zone,” Badger said. “But that hasn’t worked out so hot.”
On the heels of the tragedy, Badger had tried to kill herself to end her anguish.
The Manhattan ad executive has been inconsolable since Christmas morning 2011, when a fire broke out in her Victorian home, which her boyfriend, Michael Borcina, had been renovating.
The blaze began with embers that Borcina had cleaned out of the fireplace and put in a bag in a mudroom. They smoldered into a raging inferno that never gave her daughters or parents a chance.
The legal fallout from the fire that destroyed Badger’s life is dragging on.
Matthew Badger, Madonna’s ex-husband and the father of the tragic girls, is suing Borcina over allegedly shoddy renovations that Matthew claims made the house a firetrap. He also is suing the city of Stamford.
Madonna has notified Stamford officials that she, too, will sue the city over the fire.
The city has been criticized for its controversial decision to knock down Badger’s home a day after the fire. City officials claim it was for safety reasons, but Badger’s brother, Wade Johnson, who is handling their parents’ estates, has noted that the decision spoiled a chance to collect evidence showing who was responsible for the fire.
Madonna sounded hopeful at times about her future during her stay in Thailand, saying that since the day her world collapsed, she’s learned “there is so much love in the world.”
“I’ve received so much love from everyone, and that’s what’s helping me get through this,” Badger said.
She is a world away from Connecticut at the moment, winding through streets where young girls sell grilled bananas and fish, and solemn Buddhist monks in their orange robes collect alms.
Though she couldn’t go through with the Christmas orphanage trip, she left open the possibility of stopping by with her daughters’ gifts before heading back to her new home in Little Rock, Ark.
“I’m taking it one day at a time,” she said.