My Favorite Christmas

Whenever I'm asked to remember my favorite Christmas, it only takes an instant for the "Pepsi Thief" Christmas to jump to mind.

I was about 14 or 15 years old at the time. It was Christmas Eve, and a fresh, fluffy snow was falling as we left the Christmas Eve service at church and headed home. I was a typical teenage girl, so I had visions of Guess and Gucci dancing in my head rather than sugar plums. Other than that, it was a night a lot like that famous Christmas poem.

A few hours after going to bed, I was awakened abruptly by the sound of glass breaking. Startled out of a deep sleep, it took a minute or two to shake off the fog, and as I lay in bed trying to figure out whether I was dreaming or if perhaps the rapture was occurring, I could hear hasty footsteps coming from both ends of the house. Next came muffled but frantic whispers, and I began to realize that I wasn't dreaming, nor was I the only person in the house that was awake.

I stumbled into the living room, following the sound of the whispers, which had grown in decibel level to almost normal conversation tone, and were still rather frantic. I reached the kitchen just in time to see my Dad exit into the garage.

The garage of our rancher had been added as an afterthought, sometime after the building of the rest of the house. Because of this, the window over the kitchen sink, which I assumed had once borne a lovely view of the wooded lot next door, now looked straight into the garage.

My Mom had, only minutes before, gotten up for a 3:00 am glass of water. As she'd stood over the kitchen sink, glass in hand, she'd been startled nearly out of her skin to see someone... a stranger, poking around in our garage. She'd been so frightened she'd dropped her glass in the stainless steel sink. Now she and I both stood in the kitchen, near, but not in front of, that same window, stealing furtive, nervous glances out of it, hoping and praying that my unarmed father was not going to get beaten or shot at.

It seemed like we waited for an hour there beside the sink, listening for guns or screams but hearing nothing. In reality, it was probably five minutes or less, but eventually my Dad returned.

That snowfall had lightened up since we'd gone to bed a few hours earlier. It had left in its wake a perfect palette for capturing footprints. My Dad reported that the garage was burglar-free by the time he'd gone in, but he'd been able to follow a distinct trail through the freshly fallen snow and had tracked the thief, probably just mere seconds behind him.

From the looks of the prints, the thief had been just as startled to see my Mom as she'd been to see him. The prints leaving the garage were considerably less pristine than the ones going in. Clearly, he'd fled quickly and under some duress.

My Dad stayed inside just long enough to call 911, then headed back out to follow the footprints. By this time the neighbors behind us had been awakened too. It was clear that the thief had also entered their garage. However, he'd obviously encountered their dog, Jake, who slept in the garage. Jake's bark, which was piercing and deep-throated, was worse than his bite (which was non-existent,) and he probably wouldn't even chase a cat in the daytime. But loud and large, the sight and sound of him at 3:00 am after being so rudely awakened would have been bone-chilling.

Within minutes it had become obvious that the prowler had visited a number of homes in our small subdivision. Strangely though, this thief had only been interested in garages. Footprints, deep and perfect in the near gossamer new snow, led from garage to garage to garage throughout the neighborhood. He had apparently tested every garage door, entering the ones, like ours, that weren't locked.

Eventually the thief's footprints disappeared at the highway that ran alongside our subdivision. Snow plows and tire tracks had obscured any other prints, and it seemed as though the thief had made his escape.

My Dad returned to see if anything had been damaged or was missing from our garage. At first it looked as though nothing at all had been touched. Upon closer inspection, though, he realized something was missing after all. Oddly, a 6-pack of Pepsi, which my Dad always kept next to outside freezer, had disappeared with the intruder.

Soon other neighbors had awakened and were conferring over fences. Others whose garages had been unlocked began reporting similar oddities... there were missing Christmas turkeys and frozen apple pies, cans of cranberry sauce, bottles of wine and jugs of milk. Our burglar, so it seemed, wasn't interested in jewelry, cars or even loose change. He was looking for a Christmas dinner.

After the shock of finding a stranger in the garage began to wear off, the three of us.... Mom, Dad and I, began to chuckle at our predicament. Our feelings of indignance and violation were mixed with mirthful thoughts of little children praising Daddy the next day for the delicious Christmas dinner he'd provided for them.

My parents were still shaking, as much from laughter as from adrenaline and fear, when the phone rang in the wee morning hours of Christmas day. It was the police, who by then had been able to attend and exhaustively investigate the scene of the "crime."

They'd gone where Dad hadn't, crossing the highway and following tracks in the subdivision on the other side. The tracks converged upon a drainage ditch, the "rendezvous point," like the hub of a wheel, with footprints stretching outward in multiple trails like spokes on a bicycle tire.

At the bottom of the ditch lay the thief's booty: turkeys and pies and bottles of champagne that were by then ice-encrusted. But there was nary a trace of the bandit, who'd been in such a hurry he'd left his haul behind, perhaps to return later with a pick-up truck in which to carry it away.

Instead, the investigating officer was having a good laugh, and had called my Dad for a final statement. "And," police man said, "If you want to come across the highway and identify your Pepsi, you can have it back."