Each year end our family celebrates by decorating our house with lights.

This year our family has  much to celebrate  - The weddings during the year of both our daughters, the birth of a granddaughter, a gathering at home this December of all our far-flung children and their spouses, with both grandchildren, as well as the continued good health of the entire tribe.

With so much to celebrate, we made an extra effort to brighten our home and street this year.
Over the years we have  experienced the occasional minor random act of vandalism  to the lights, but this year we were shocked with the deliberate theft of a set of four “Lollipop” lights .

Part of our security system at home is a CCTV system, so we rolled it  back to see when the lights went missing, and found evidence of the theft on three of the cameras at 23 minutes to midnight on Tuesday, 8 December. The footage shows that the person drove in his vehicle up the street with its lights off - a clear sign that this was not some youthful prank.

Although the white man who took the lights is not easily identifiable on camera, apart from his clothing, his bakkie is very identifiable - there are not that many white Toyota Hilux bakkies with the same distinctive wheels, railings on the load box and unusual front bull bars in town.

I have so much to be thankful for this festive season, so I would not like to spoil someone else’s  holidays by laying criminal charges, therefore I invite him to return the lights he took, so we can both forget about the incident.

- By Malcolm Tucker