Gather ’round, children! It’s time for another heartwarming holiday tale of petty theft, lessons learned, and zero consequences for bad behavior.
When I was in 5th and 6th grade, I was big into stealing. Growing up in Scranton, there wasn’t much else to do. With a whopping five dollar-a-month allowance, there wasn’t much I could actually go out and buy for myself, either.
This was 1990 and five dollars could buy you a Happy Meal and two games at the arcade — if you were lucky.
This was why my brother and I had taken to thievery.
The Birth of the Bubblegum Bandits: A Villain Origin Story
Gum, in any form, was strictly forbidden in our house. Mom wouldn’t even allow us to have chewing gum, even if it was recommended by nine out of ten dentists.
Of course, the best way to make someone want something is to tell them they can’t have it.
Mom knew this, which was why she monitored us closely. At one point, my brother and I pooled our resources and attempted to use our Warren Buffett-esque allowances to purchase a fifty-cent pack of gum. Mom spotted me in the checkout lane and immediately confiscated it after cracking us five across the eyes in public.
Not only did we get screwed out of the joy of experiencing Cherry Cola-flavored Bubbalicious, but we effectively threw 1/20th of our collective allowances in the middle of the street.
The only way to get our grubby paws on some gum was to steal it.
On another grocery shopping excursion, my brother and I broke away from our parents and headed to the checkout lane, filled with items intended for impulse purchasing. We greedily eyed the racks brimming with brightly-hued candy, beckoning us to take them home without paying. We lifted two packs apiece and planned to divvy them up when we got home.
After Mom and Dad checked out, we joined them at the front and walked out of the store. We were calm, cool, preteen sneak thieves learning the ropes at the young ages of 7 and 10-years old.
Our parents loaded the groceries into the trunk and into the backseat. Peering over the top of a bag containing a protruding cluster of celery stalks, my brother and I exchanged devious smiles as Mom got behind the wheel and Dad rode shotgun.
I gripped the twin packs of gum in my sweaty hand, anticipating the moment where I could rip open the pack and chew, chew, chew away on the sweet treat I had been denied for so long. I could almost taste it! (Literally.)
As Mom and Dad unpacked the groceries, my brother and I rushed to our room.
The plan was to stash the gum in the large, yellow toboggan that Mom had stored beneath my twin bed. Boxes and boxes of shoes were stored beneath my brother’s twin bed on the other side of the room.
My brother and I opted to go to bed early that Thursday night. No fuss was raised as we retired to our room at 10pm. It was just as well. It would give Mom some peace and quiet to watch L.A. Law and ogle Harry Hamlin while Dad hung out in the bathroom.
The Joys of Ill-Gotten Gum & Preteen Petty Theft
With our parents occupied, we could silently chew our bubblegum in the dark.
I handed my brother the first piece: A block of Watermelon Bubblicious. I went right for the Chocolate Mint gum and savored the taste. It was mind-blowing! How could they pack all that flavor into such a small piece of candy!?
About five minutes later, the gum started to lose its flavor. By that point, my brother and I were trying to figure out how to blow bubbles. I had seen other kids do this with relative ease. Neither of us could get the hang of it just yet. I decided to try blowing bubbles by taking the gum out of my mouth, spreading it until it covered my lips like a neon green piece of duct tape and blowing into it. I was pretty damn pleased with myself as I exhaled and a large bubble began to form. My brother followed suit with his gum and we were both blowing bubbles in the dark.
“This is fucking awesome!” my brother said in a hushed voice.
“I know!”
“Wanna try another piece?”
“Hell yeah,” I replied, rummaging in the sled beneath my bed to dole out more of our stash. This time, he tried a Chocolate Mint piece and I helped myself to Watermelon.
This was truly living the dream.
A Rookie Mistake
We sat there chewing for a solid half hour before calling it a night. To avoid getting caught, we swallowed our gum — urban legends, be damned! Whether they were true or not, it was a small price to pay for the awesome, fruity blast of flavor.
We couldn’t throw them in the adjoining bathroom since Mom would religiously root through the trash basket for any foreign objects like a WWE referee. My brother and I had already learned our lesson the previous year when we got busted for sneaking up to TCBY to get forbidden frozen yogurt and stashing the empty cups in the trash. Mom found them and punished us for two weeks, taking away my radio and my brother’s sports-watching privileges.
After the Great Fro-Yo Fiasco of ‘89, we’d learned to dispose of any incriminating evidence in the apartment complex’s community laundry room where it would be much harder to pin the rap on either of us.
Although we swallowed our gum, we discarded the wrappers in the toboggan beneath my bed, not giving it a second thought.
As the months passed, our stash grew exponentially. My brother and I had turned pro when it came to petty theft. Soon, there were at least 50 packs of gum and an assortment of wadded up wrappers for the gum we had chewed, savored, and swallowed.
However, we had made a rookie mistake. There were still tons of gum wrappers and empty packages that we had neglected to chuck. The empire that had started with a mere four packs of gum had now expanded to include no less than a substantial, 300-plus item collection that took up the entire length of the sleigh beneath my bed.
If we were smart, we would have started flushing them down the toilet one by one or brought them to school to toss in the trash. However, we were so focused on not getting caught stealing that we totally neglected making sure we didn’t get busted by Mom for not properly disposing of the evidence.
And Mom was a whole lot scarier than any grocery store gumshoe.
The Reckoning: A Price to Pay for Petty Theft?
It was mid-December when that fateful day came.
“Hey, kids!” Mom chirped brightly. “Give me an hour and I’ll help you clean up your room. It’s time to get ready for Christmas! We’ll have to go through the boxes under your beds to get the snow boots and we’ll dust off the sled.”
Shit. That meant she was going to go under the bed, look into the toboggan, and see the HUNDREDS of empty gum wrappers we’d pilfered over the course of a few months.
I looked over at my brother and wondered if he had broken out into a cold sweat, too.
“Thanks, Mom!” I said, desperately trying to cover the fact that I damn near shit myself. “We’ll start tidying up right now!”
We hurried back to our room and shut the door and locked it.
“Oh, shit!” my brother squeaked in a whisper-scream. “What are we going to do!?”
“We gotta empty out that sled or we’re completely fucked,” I was in full-blown panic mode myself.
Evading Santa’s Shit List: A Race Against Time
We had to work fast. The clock was ticking, with less than an hour to dispose of the wrappers while Mom got her Harry Hamlin and Jimmy Smits fix.
We couldn’t toss them out the window. Too obvious. Couldn’t stuff them in our school bags since Mom would check those at night to be sure we were all packed for the next morning.
“Well, where are we going to put it?” My brother pulled out the sled from under the bed. It was almost overflowing with wrappers that had accumulated over the course of several months.
“Our only option is to flush them,” I said.
“Okay,” my brother said, picking up a huge handful.
I shook my head. “We have to do it in small batches. If we don’t, we’ll clog the toilet and Mom will kill us even harder.”
It was true. Mom loved the holidays, but could also make them supremely unpleasant if you incurred her wrath. Every year, Dad could count on dodging a wrench or screwdriver when putting up the tree. It was a holiday tradition for our family.
Mom lobbing tools at Dad during the holidays would look like a love tap by comparison if she found out we’d pinched the mother lode of bubblegum.
“We can use Dad’s bathroom, too,” he suggested, the wheels in his brain turning rapidly
“Good thinking! We just have to be sure he doesn’t have to go in there. You’ll have to lock the door once you’re in, though.”
Our apartment had a one-and-a-half, Jack-and-Jill bathroom. Since Dad liked to spray mount his hair with half a can of Aquanet and smoke in his bathroom, Mom gave him his own half-bath to use as he pleased while the three of us shared the other bathroom.
Thankfully, the crapper was connected to our room, making for an easy Hogan’s Heroes pipeline to get rid of the evidence. Due to our apartment’s setup, we could easily open the door to the one half-bath and make a crossover six feet away to Dad’s half-bath and flush our chunks of wrappers simultaneously. This would cut disposal time in half.
On the odd chance that Mom was jolted out of her L.A. Law coma by the sound of bah-wooshing toilets in-stereo, we planned a cover story that we had the runs and weren’t feeling good.
To cover the sound of flushing, my bro and I cranked some music. In addition to providing suitable cover, the “Hot 9 at 9” radio program on 98.5 KRZ FM served as a soundtrack to our dastardly operation
Gradually, the pile started to disappear. It took half an hour of the two of us flushing small batches down two separate toilets to get rid of everything.
We managed to finish just in time. Just as the LED numbers on the alarm click switched from 9:59 pm to 10:00 pm, Mom knocked on the door.
“Quick!” I hissed. “Sit your ass on the toilet and pretend you had the shits just in case. It’ll explain the flushing in case Mom or Dad heard any of it.”
My brother shut the door and parked it on the toilet.
I opened the door and Mom was none the wiser to the ill-gotten gum that my brother and I had been hoarding for months.
While it was a close call, it didn’t put an end to our thieving. At least not for a few more years. But that is a tale for another time!
Some miracles happen on 34th street. Others happen in a stable in Bethlehem, long ago. Sure, it’s not The Greatest Story Ever Told, or the plot of a classic holiday movie, but how we got rid of the wrappers without clogging the toilet and getting busted was a true Christmas miracle. Hey! Ya gotta take those wins where you can get ’em!
Here’s hoping your holiday season and 2025 are filled with miracles and joy of your own.