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Stealing is as old as human nature. From cold, hard cash to cars, there are some people out there who will take whatever they want from others. However, there are some people out there who actually feel bad for theft and try to atone for their sins, like a guilt-wracked jewelry thief in Phoenix, Ariz.

A small mom-and-pop jewelry shop in Phoenix experienced that miracle when a woman who returned a $3,800 pair of white-gold, diamond earrings days after swiping them from the counter. "[She said] 'I stole these earrings from you,' and she was crying, and so I started crying, I gave her a hug," Alyssa Vochis, owner of Alyssa Jeweler's Workbench and Gallery, told ABC 15.

According to Vochis, the woman left a note apologizing for what she did and even told the owner that she was seeing a therapist because of her pervasive guilt. Since it's the holiday season, the shop won't be pressing any charges. "The suffering she must be going through is far worse than any prosecution," Vochis said.

While it seems that burglars making amends for bad deeds is rare, it actually happens more often than you may think.

For instance, four men held a Milwaukee Army reservist at gunpoint one November evening. After finding his wallet and looking through its contents, they found his Army ID and realized that the man they just mugged was in the military. One of the armed men told his accomplices to give back the soldier's wallet, cell phone and even PowerBar wrapper they found in the unidentified reservist's pockets. "The guy continued to say throughout the situation that he respects what I do and at one point he actually thanked me, and he actually apologized," the reservist told the Associated Press.

We've told you about the burglars who broke into one family's home, tied them up and still managed to feed a crying infant, but one Wisconsin thief decided that a car wasn't worth stealing because it had a baby in the backseat. Police said that the thief took a parked car that was left running. The driver had run into her house quickly to pick up some snacks between errands. However only minutes after taking the vehicle, the carjacker found a 9-month-old strapped into a car seat in the back, freaked out and returned the car to where he found it.

Although these burglars quickly made their decisions to return the stolen goods, sometimes giving back something you stole may take a few years -- or even sometimes decades. In 2006, one elderly French man anonymously returned a relic he took from a Norwegian museum 42 years prior. In his typed letter to the museum he wrote, "In my old age ... I have now decided to return it to the descendants of those who imagined it, built it and used it."

While the carved wooden piece looks like it came from a group of indigenous people of northern Europe, museum officials have no idea what the object actually is or what it is used for. In the end, the old Frenchman atoned for his mistake, and the museum didn't press charges.

Just a few stories to think about while you're planning to do the right thing this holiday season.

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