Caught on the Nativity cam

EUREKA SPRINGS, Ark. – Virginia Voiers thought she was taking part in a rambunctious holiday custom, but a carriage driver thought differently and called police when he saw the 70-year-old grandmother stealing the baby Jesus from the city’s nativity scene.
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Voiers was ticketed for misdemeanor theft by an officer who quickly caught up with her van after she foisted the statue.

"It was a lark, it wasn’t any serious stealing," Voiers told the Lovely County Citizen newspaper of Eureka Springs. "My granddaughter commented that no one had taken the baby Jesus this year and said, ‘Grandma?’ I said, ‘Oh, what the heck.’"

Usually, the baby Jesus is returned by the thief. Voiers said her Saturday caper was the first time she’d taken anything from the nativity.

"I didn’t know we had a tattletale downtown," said Voiers, who is also a Sunday school teacher at a Methodist church. She said she told her pastor what happened.

"He said, ‘Bless you, child. Go and sin no more,’" she said, and added that he asked, "’You didn’t tell them you are a Methodist, did you?’"

Voiers was caught because the Beta Sigma Phi sorority, which erects the nativity scene, accessorized this year’s edition with a security camera that is monitored at police headquarters. [Source][Via ‘Not So Quiet’ Catholic Corner]

Maybe she is actually part of a group I wrote a parody story about two years ago.

(Roto Reuters) A rash of recent thefts of baby Jesus’ and other Christmas items has lead investigators to discover a previously unknown group. These nativity thefts had at first seemed unrelated and attributed to anti-religion zealots or bored teenagers. Locally a suspicious sheriff had radio tagged baby Jesus’ with a special transmitter across the county and when they turned up missing he found that all of them had been relocated and stockpiled in the same warehouse.

After a search warrant was obtained they found in the warehouse hundreds of crèche christs, Christmas tree, and other ornaments carefully labeled with the address of where they were taken from. The owners of the warehouse turned out to be a group called MARCH (Militant Adventists Restore Christmas Holiday). Search of the premises found signs such as "Santa sucks, St. Nicholas Rules", "Christmas starts on the 25th", and "Hey, Hey, Ho Ho Ho, Advent is for penance you fool."

A lawyer speaking for the leader of MARCH, Mr. Pen Attent, released this statement. "Our purpose was not theft and we fully intended to return all items after midnight on the 25th of December. We were sick and tired of Nativity cribs containing the infant Jesus up to a month before he was born. Since otherwise well meaning people had not done this on their own, we just wanted to help them out. We wanted to stop the crèche creep where every year the celebration of Christmas is started earlier and earlier. While starting shopping on the Friday after Thanksgiving might be a penitential activity at many malls, we wanted to restore the fuller meaning of Advent to awaiting the birth of the Messiah."