CINCINNATI – Operators of area Nativity displays are beefing up security hoping to prevent the kind of vandalism that has plagued religious holiday displays both locally and nationwide in recent years. Once viewed as sacred, exhibits and displays depicting the birth of Christ in a cold Bethlehem stable over 2000 years ago are increasingly becoming the targets of acts of wanton destruction and theft.

   Steve Neal, Safety Service Director for the city of Cheviot, issued a strong warning, “If we catch anybody doing it, we will prosecute. The law is the law.”

   Cheviot, a suburb west of Cincinnati, has sponsored a community Nativity scene for its residents each of the last 43 years. Three times within the past four Christmas season’s thieves have stolen the Christ child figurine from the Cheviot display. Last year after the city’s original baby Jesus figure was taken, a local 10-year-old girl stepped forward to donate her own doll for the town Nativity. “She donated her own baby Jesus because she thought Christmas just wouldn’t be the same without Jesus lying in the manger,” said Neal.

   The child’s replacement Jesus was also stolen less that a week later. “I felt so bad for that poor little girl,” Neal said. “She was just trying to do a good thing.”

   The original baby Jesus figurine that lay safely in the Cheviot manger for over 40 years has never been recovered. Neal said the Cheviot Business Association was forced to buy a new figurine at a cost of approximately $500.00.

   In 2005 Cheviot Police received an anonymous tip according to Neal that led them to the location where the 2nd stolen Jesus figurine had “been stuffed in some bushes.”

   City officials have installed Security cameras within the stable “so that if somebody takes (any of the display figures) will be able to monitor the film and find out who did it.”

   The Cheviot Nativity often includes live sheep. “We have to assign police officers just to watch the sheep so that people don’t take them,” Neal said.

   Perhaps the Cincinnati area’s most historic Nativity scene, in its 65th season, is in Cincinnati’s Eden Park. Sponsored by the Western and Southern Life Insurance Company the Eden Park Nativity and Christmas Poinsettia, next to the Krohn Conservatory, is visited by nearly 50,000 people annually.

   Eden Park borders on both District 1 and District 4 of the Cincinnati Police Department and benefits from patrols by both those precincts as well as Hamilton County Park District personnel. Additionally, a stable hand often sleeps on the premises to provide additional security for the animals at night.

   The Nativity scene at the Paul Young Funeral Home on Hamilton Ave. in Mt. Healthy is entering its 48th year.

   Paul Young III said for 45 years the display remained generally trouble free “but in the last couple of years we have had to take extra security measures.”

   Painstakingly hand-crafted by Young’s wax artisan grandfather (Paul Young, Sr.) over a period of several years in the 1950’s the detailed features of the various figures in the Mt. Healthy nativity are amazingly life-like. Family members and “a mailman named Davis” served as the original models for the Mary, Joseph, three wise men and two shepherd figures. “Each hair was put in (the wax) one by one. They’re not wigs. It was a true labor of love on my grandfather’s part,” said Young.

   Currently Young described that it takes three full days with four people working to erect the nativity display and animal pens on the Young Funeral Home grounds each year.

   In December 2002 late night hooligans opened the Young Funeral Home nativity’s animal pens, sending 10-15 sheep as well as several donkeys and goats wandering down busy Hamilton Ave. Miraculously no animals or motorists were injured. They also stole the baby Jesus from the Nativity’s crib. Young then placed a sign in the manger reading “Jesus stolen from this Crib Dec. 28th.”

   In January 2003 Mt. Healthy Police, acting on an anonymous tip received New Years Eve arrested two men and two women, all in their early twenties. The four told Mt. Healthy police officers they wanted “to hang out with Jesus” and had planned to take photos of themselves with the sculpture of the infant Christ child at various locations around Cincinnati.

   “They were old enough to know better,” Young acknowledged. “That’s just not mischievousness anymore when they do that,” added a secretary at the Young Funeral Home. “It’s malicious.”

   That same year another baby Jesus was stolen from the Zettler Funeral Home display in Hamilton, Ohio.

   Young said he has had to add a $200 alarm system to his nativity and that staff and family members rotate shifts during December to ensure that someone is on site 24 hours a day. Additionally an audio monitor in the sheep pen alerts staff inside to animal disturbances.

   People start calling as early as September “making sure we’re still going to do the nativity.” Young said he, his father and brother are especially heartened by callers who volunteer to help with the 2006 display’s security.

   “We see many of the same people year after year,” said Young. “We talk to people all the time…grandparents who tell us they brought their kids here and now they’re bringing their grandchildren.”

   Young acknowledged that Christmas Season 2004 and 2005 saw some of the largest crowds ever at the Hamilton Ave. Nativity scene.

   Those folks, Young maintains, are determined to keep this particular Christmas family tradition going despite the thuggish attempts in recent years to ruin it.

   This year Cheviot officials maintain they are prepared in the event Grinches there again attempt to steal the symbolic Reason for the Season. Neal said, “I don’t know if it’s an attack on Christianity or what…all I know is that it ticks people off. (Crime) is bad enough. But when you start messing with sacred religious symbols, how low can you go?”