One afternoon when I was just a small child, I meandered upstairs into our attic for no particular reason other than wanting to explore it.  I found some old furniture with blackened, sun-crazed surfaces up there, along with lots of big dusty boxes, several suitcases, and two or three full-sized steamer trunks.

I was pretty sure the suitcases didn’t have anything in them, and the boxes were all taped up in a way that I didn’t want to have to mess with in order to check out their contents. But the trunks?  Hey, from their hinges and their hasps, it was pretty clear how to get into them.

As I raised the lid of one of the trunks slowly over my head, I was surprised to see not a bunch of doilies or old people’s clothes or stuff like that which I’d found in the other trunks.  This one mainly held colorful cardboard boxes with cellophane windows.  As I looked closer, I found that one of them held a set of olive-drab rubbery-plastic soldiers in modern helmets and fatigues.  The other contained a set of likewise rubbery-plastic cowboys and their horses.

I knew Christmas wasn’t too far away.  Had I somehow stumbled onto…well, not exactly Santa’s workshop, but maybe something more like his stash house?

Being a typically impatient small boy, I didn’t dwell too long on these questions.  I also wasn’t about to waste time exploring the boxes’ intended methods of opening and closure.  I just happily smashed and ripped my way through their cellophane windows, grabbed my prizes, and got lost for what seemed like hours playing out stories with them on the bare unfinished planks of our attic floor.

When I finally had my fill and started to return the toys to their boxes, it hit me:  with all that broken cellophane, Santa was sure to find out I had looted his toy store.  What would happen to me then?

Maybe my punishment for being so naughty would be that these toys would never find their way under our Christmas tree.  Or maybe I wouldn’t get any presents at all—just that lump of coal that people said he gave to bad children.

In what seemed to me an eternity between that afternoon and Christmas, my dread of what might be coming deepened.  As I suspect is fairly common in kids below a certain age, in my mind, Santa Claus and God kind of blurred into each other.  (After all, they were both big old guys with gray beards and amazing powers.  You didn’t want to get on the wrong side of either of them.)  Who could tell what kind of punishment Santa/God might have in store for me?

After dinner on Christmas Eve, we finally opened our presents. (We did it then because as a heavy drinker whose breakfasts consisted largely of Bromo-Seltzer, my dad wasn’t big on getting up early in the morning.) Before long, a present was handed to me whose shape clearly indicated it was one of the boxes whose cellophane I was guilty of breaking and entering.

My usual approach to opening presents—gleefully ripping and shredding paper, bows, boxes, anything that might stand between me and my treasure—was suddenly replaced by a gentle, slow, respectful ritual. When it came time to oh-so-carefully slide the box out of its wrappings, I discovered that…

The cellophane window was intact again!

I didn’t know what to think…other than that somehow, I had just witnessed a miracle!

Given my conceptual blurring of God and Santa, this didn’t appear especially implausible.  Only why had he done it for me?  When I’d been bad??!!

It was only much later in my life that it occurred to me that my mom’s skill at handling Saran Wrap and tape was more likely the cause of this astonishing transformation.

In the interim, I experienced my first major religious disillusionment.