Twas’ the Christmas I Stole the Baby Jesus

There’s a line in Frank McCourt’s book “Angela’s Ashes” that has always stayed with me:

“When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.”

Ok so the above equation is not exactly me.  If you subtract the miserable, add a German hyphenated Irish, multiplied by the fact that I was the daughter of a NYPD officer, add water and stir, and that pretty much sums up my sentiments on my youth.

The final answer: I was a deeply spiritual kid who never did anything bad until one Christmas in the late 80s when I decided to damn it all to hell and get righteous! 

Now back then, people actually waited until December to put up their Christmas decorations.  Nothing was too complicated or mechanical.  You had only a few things to choose from, a fat plastic Frosty, fat plastic Santa, or a string of three to eight fat plastic reindeer; the number depended on the width of your house.  If you lived close to the church you might go all out and decorate your front lawn with a Nativity set equipped with the token fast plastic black wise man.

Now I had no problem with the Nativity set but what really got my holy goat was that people would put the Baby Jesus out well before his birth date.  My thought was, if you could get up early on Baby JC’s birthday to sneak presents under the tree for your kids, you could do the same and put Baby JC in his manger. 

So that’s when it happened, I found myself walking up stoop to some unknown person’s home, walking across the lawn and there he was all swaddled in his plastic carved folds with his chubby arms extending out and upwards.  It looked like he could walk a tightrope, or tread water, or maybe even levitate right there in front of me and admonish me for what I was about to do with him which was to tuck him under my coat.  

I did not do this alone.  My partner in crime was Annemarie Fronhopher. She was a year my senior, weird, short cropped black hair with round John Lennon glasses.  She wore a green army coat, walked with a waddle and a permanent scowl on her face.  I of course thought she was the coolest thing.

We spent a lot of time together listening to the Beatles, roaming the streets of Middle Village, sneaking into the city, laying down in the middle of the street waiting for cars to ride over us or drinking wine coolers down at the train tracks. We would talk for hours about stupid stuff that non-average girls would talk about like damning the man, making plans to move out West, and make fun of all the things people loved about our neighborhood that we hated. 

For good measure, we swaddled the fat plastic Baby JC in a plastic Key Food bag and I hd him in my parents garage for a few days.  The plan was that AF and I would sneak out of our houses early Christmas morning, meet in front of my house and put him in his proper place.  I had given AF the goods a few days before we would execute our plan. 

On Christmas morning, I threw on my winter coat and my one black, my one pink Converse sneaker hightops and waited outside in the snow at the end of my parent’s driveway but AF never showed.  This was well before the age of cell phones so I had no way of contacting her via text or face time to see what the holdup was.  I waited for what seemed to be an eternity but AF was a no show.

Disappointed, I went back inside and wondered.  It wasn’t for another week maybe two (a lifetime in tweenage years) before I found out what happened.  AF’s little sister had gotten up before her and woke the whole household wanting to open up her Christmas presents.  AF assured me that she had returned Baby JC on her own a few days after Christmas.  But I’ll never know for sure.  We kind of parted was a bit after that.

It wasn’t until a few years ago when I was visiting my parents in Florida during the holidays when I remembered this story.  We were sitting down eating dinner when I had a giggle fit and my parents were looking at me with questionable faces.  I fessed up to my pre-adolescent crime and the look of horror on their faces put a quick end to the steaming hot turkey dinner.  I had somehow implicated them in my crime that involved according to my father - kidnapping, harboring a holy figure, and keeping stolen merchandise on their property.  My punishment at the age of 31 was to eat dinner alone while I sat in my own shame while my parents admonished me with dirty looks.  It just made me laugh harder.

Later that night, I was sitting on the couch with my dad watching a movie.  Next thing I knew the whole couch started shaking because my dad was trying to hold in his laughter.  He threw his arm around me and laughed so hard he cried. A few weeks later, my mom called me on her cell phone to tell me that she and dad were in a Salvation Army looking at other people’s treasures when she had to wrestle a fat plastic Baby Jesus out of Dad’s hands.  His plan was to buy it and mail it to me as a payback from the Big Guy.  Confirmation that I am indeed my father’s child.   

So let this be a lesson to you Christmas freaks, remember the reason for the season.