A St. Louis-style Holiday, Part I

There's one particular memory I have of spending holiday breaks in St. Louis over the years. During the winter breaks in high school, I hung out with kids of family friends in town, even though I didn't grow up in St. Louis. While most midwestern kids at that age were sniffing glue or sneaking beers from their parents' fridge, these kids had other means of entertainment. One night, probably after a late run to Wendy's, we piled into a station wagon, flying down a residential street laden with Christmas lights and nativity sets. I was sharing the backseat with 3 others, holding on to my fries and praying we'd get back home in one piece, when a couple of the guys talked of taking a baby Jesus from some poor bastard's yard. I looked on toward the brightly lit yards of the split-level homes and assumed my friends were bullshitting. Up to that point, the extent of mischief in my life was fawning over athletic celebrities and attempting to steal cinemax from the neighbor's cable. The next thing I knew, we screeched to a halt, one of the guys jumped out and ran straight for a nativity scene. I thought about how some Christian, Missourian Ma and Pa took the effort to set up a depiction of exactly how little baby Jesus was born, proudly displaying their Christmas pride to the neighborhood. And we were just a couple of teenagers looking for a good laugh. My friend grabbed the baby, a lamb, and bolted back to the car. Everyone was hooting and hollering, and meanwhile I was about to shit myself. We drove half a mile down the road and pulled over again to deposit the baby and lamb in someone else's yard. No fucking way. I started cracking up and nervously looking around to see if there were any witnesses. We sped out of dodge and some of the kids talked of hitting some churches to do the same thing but thank god their sensibility set in and they figured there would be surveillance or cops set up. At the moment, my sheltered ass was horrified - albeit amused - by the mischief I was involved in. But in retrospect, I crack up thinking about it and kind of wish I could go back to those reckless, innocent teenage adventures where we just didn't give a fuck.