Not even Charles Dickens could have imagined an act so Scrooge-like. It is especially so since it happened during the joyous season celebrating the birth of our Lord and Savior!

A brazen thief or thieves stole as much as $25,000 in cash and checks Christmas Day from a church here, jolting a congregation that had been reveling in the holiday spirit of peace and good will.

The money, collected from four Christmas weekend services at Pendleton Center United Methodist Church in Pendleton, New York, largely was earmarked for charitable missions. An estimated 1,300 people attended the four services, and most of them gave Christmas offerings.

Two interior doors were smashed in and broken, and another inside door was unlocked with a key or otherwise bypassed. The thieves knew what they were looking for.

Church leaders don't know exactly how much money was lost, because they had yet to count the gifts before leaving the church early Sunday afternoon.

Christmas giving in years past typically has amounted to $20,000 to $25,000 — double or triple what the church gets from collections in a normal weekend.

According to the pastor, this was not a sup-of-the-moment theft. The thieves had been planning this for some time.

Most of the stolen contributions were believed to be checks, and church leaders were trying to get word out so that donors could stop payment on the checks and issue new ones. Past Christmas collections usually had between $3,000 and $5,000 in cash gifts.

This is especially sad because these contributions were gifts to God. Once again, karma has a way of coming to bite people on the backside. I would bet this will hold true with these thieves. Perhaps a good stop theft class would prevent them from an eternity in damnation.