These Thieves Stole 190 Christmas Trees From a Manchester Minimarket

From the Column ‘The VICE Guide to Right Now’

CCTV footage from Greater Manchester Police via

You don’t need to be religious to know Christmas is about sharing and caring and spending time with the one’s you love. It’s a time you get to spend seven hours travelling home on a Megabus, just to force a smile through three consecutive games of Articulate while pretending not to notice your grandma’s increasingly audible incontinence. Christmas is, at the end of the day, about drawing on our lesser-seen qualities: kindness, compassion, patience.

But someone’s always got to try and ruin it, haven’t they. This year, a pair of robbers have been getting into the spirit of Christmas by stealing 190 Christmas trees from a minimarket in Chorlton, The Telegraph reports. The thieves returned to the store multiple times over the weekend of Saturday 28th November, dragging the trees from the minimart store room to their van waiting outside. The only flaw to their – and honestly, who would have ever guessed – the storeroom was hooked up with CCTV.

That CCTV has now been released by the Greater Manchester Police so the whole world can see this pair of crooks making complete tits out of themselves as they try once again to ruin Christmas. By now you’d think they would have learned: Scrooge, the Grinch, George Michael – you don’t fuck with Christmas, Christmas fucks with you.

For now the offenders roam free, apparently hawking their black-market firs out the back of their van. But if my experience of Santa and the severity of his bookkeeping is anything to go by, these naughty boys will be lucky to get even a satsuma come Christmas day.