“At Santa Claus Village, I saw the same sort of bewilderment on the faces of parents that I’d seen at Fatima, in Portugal, when I’d visited earlier this year. At Fátima, many of those faces belonged to people who had crawled, painfully, on their knees for miles in hopes of some miracle to be found … Yet for me, the greatest mystery at Fatima was: How could one small town support so many tacky souvenir vendors hawking the exact same religious tchotchkes?”