John Young is on vacation. This is a reprint from Christmas 2000.

In our memories most of us think we can mark the end of innocence — a single jarring moment that profoundly alters how we look at life.

That’s not really how we lose our innocence, of course. It wears off gradually, like fuzz on antlers. Still, certain cues return us to moments when we realized that what glitters can break and what breaks cannot always mend.

One such cue for me is an odd one: young carolers. They take me back to a moment when I realized little boys and girls were not porcelain-made.

In our church youth group when I was 8 or 9 was a rambunctious girl named Cindy. One day she stopped coming to church. She’d gotten sick and had brain surgery, we were told.

That Christmas our youth group went caroling. We stopped at Cindy’s home. I had no idea how sick she was. I figured she’d stand in the doorway and wave in robe and slippers.

Her father answered our knock on the door. We all braced for a big hello from her. He went back into the house and emerged with a limp form draped over his right shoulder. There, her eyes in a blank stare, legs and arms limp, was our friend Cindy.

As her father positioned her head and shoulders over his own so she could face us, Cindy’s bangs bounced like a rag doll’s.

We gulped. And then we sang. There were no greetings to exchange with her, although her father thanked us warmly.

For a moment I worried that we might have barged in on someone’s suffering. Shortly it occurred to me that Cindy’s father wasn’t faking his gratitude. He was sincerely appreciative. Maybe he saw a reaction in Cindy that an 8-year-old could not.

We were all still at the stage of life when Christmas was gauged mainly by tangibles, making this a very sad scene. Whatever was under Cindy’s tree would not be opened by her limp hands. That was hard to grasp. No ice skates for this girl. No jump rope.

Still, seeing the father positioning his daughter in the doorway for our amateur-hour performance, I got a little inkling of how small gifts can have big meanings.

After all, in the harrowing weeks prior to that night, Cindy’s parents had cried themselves to sleep for fear she would die on the operating table or that whatever the doctors found in her brain they could not remove.

Surgery had disabled her immensely, but there was hope for rehabilitation. And when you face the loss of a child, rehabilitation sounds like Christmas morning.

Since then I’ve had many opportunities to experience Christmas gifts in similar scale. A few years ago I happened upon a woman visiting her husband at the VA Medical Center. To the uninitiated eye her visit was pointless. A victim of advanced Alzheimer’s disease, her mate simply stared into space.

She was convinced that being there, dressed all in red, holding his hand, cheered him. Even if she had no way of verifying that hunch about him, being there cheered her.

There was irony in these visits. When he, retired military, was healthy, the two of them would visit the VA hospital in Houston and sing carols to the patients.

I must admit that as a kid the whole carol phenomenon didn’t resonate — not like, say, the hot chocolate waiting for us when the caroling was all over. But the longer you live the more you come to appreciate traditions that made no sense before, like people showing up with food when a loved one dies.

I now feel a lot better about singing to Cindy than I did seeing her slung over her father’s shoulders. I think we were doing something good and meaningful.

The last time I saw Cindy , a few years later, she was a lot better. She needed a wheel chair. Her speech was impaired. But she was not the rag doll I’d seen before. What life had been saved on a surgeon’s table was surging again. What appeared to me that night to have been be the scantest of Christmas blessings was in fact the best one imaginable.

John Young’s column appears Thursday and Sunday. E-mail: jyoung@wacotrib.com.