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Little by little, those things that had been stolen were returned: a camera and memory chip, a cell phone.

This morning it was my teenage son's old brown sweatshirt, found loosely folded atop the woodpile outside the sliding glass door.

Wrapped inside the sweatshirt were two Xbox 360 games, one opened and apparently played. They had been new and packaged together when I purchased them about a week before they disappeared.

A note was in the pocket: "Games I thought I returned . . . guess not."

Those of you who keep up with this column, especially when it turns self-indulgently personal, know that my home was broken into earlier this month, the thief seeming to know exactly where to find cell phones, iPods, video games and, worst of all, a new Xbox 360 that I had bought in the predawn hours of Black Friday as the Big Gift (read: only gift besides little googaws and underwear) for my kids.

My old cop reporter sense and mom intuition had led me to believe that the thief was a neighbor kid, my sons' onetime best friend, a boy who had practically grown up in my home and whose loneliness and inner rage I had sensed early on.

I was right on all counts.

I had confronted him on the MySpace page I had tracked him to, and he had crumbled, confessed, apologized and promised to get back the pilfered goods. More than that, he had also confessed on tape to a Bernalillo County sheriff's detective.

"I know I am a (expletive) up person but I guess it's just jealousy to me," he wrote me on MySpace, going into a grammatically tortured litany of what was bad in his life: abandoned by his father, a mother and stepfather who were embarrassed by him and ignored him, kicked out of high school, no money, no job, no video games, no cell phones, nothing to keep him occupied and no one to listen to him. "Honestly I think I lost hope a good while ago . . . as you know I don't know what to do anymore."

He is 15.

He had sold my children's Christmas for cigarettes.

Justice will now do what it has to do, and my hope is not to gain vengeance but intervention, redirection and someone to listen to him, and, yes, the Xbox 360 before Christmas.

I doubt the latter will happen.

But what has happened beyond this is so much more meaningful. Shortly after word spread of the theft, and unbeknownst to me, my colleagues at The Tribune — people who are, like me, facing unemployment if the newspaper shuts its doors — began collecting nearly $400 to replace our Christmas.

One woman told her children what happened and they gladly handed over their savings.

A former colleague, who now works at the Orlando Sentinel, also secured a new Xbox 360.

It felt like "It's a Wonderful Life." Because it is.

The woman with the generous children told me that the day my Tribune friends handed me this stunning wad of cash she received an overdue check she had desperately needed for months.

It was more than enough to pay back her children for their kind donation to my children.

"Double miracle," she said.

That's how it works, eventually, one bad thing replaced by good deeds, one sadness replaced by joy or at least some inner peace.

This year, you and I have shared numerous stories of sadness and evil — the accused deputy killer and the crusade of his victim's parents to save others, a dying robbery suspect who received last-minute mercy from the courts, the rape victim with cerebral palsy who found joy in learning, the military vet struggling to find health who found inner strength, the mentally tormented man accused of killing five people who is finally getting the help he needs.

Behind each of them, if you look hard enough — and, in some cases, really hard — there is grace and something to be learned.

I hope we've both learned something from them all.

For me personally, behind the thoughtless thievery by a lost boy I found the gift of having caring friends, a far better present than any Xbox 360.

This Christmas, I wish you grace and wonder and friendship and the good that's always there just around the corner.