Well, I've learned more!!! I think I've done it...

First, I've moved the move event handling to the Canvas instead of each Ellipse. That's good and bad, from an OOP standpoint. At least when the mouse event handling is a responsibility of the HolePattern to set it on up each Hole (the ellipse that is the visual of the Hole), it is abstracted away so that any consumer of my HolePattern will get this functioanality automactically. However, by moving it to the main UI code, I now am dealing with my canvas mouse event at a higher level. But that's not all bad either. We could discuss this part for days.

The point is, I have designed a way to create a "margin of error" when picking something on a canvas with a mouse, and then reading the Hole that the selected Ellipse belongs to, and then I can read the HolePattern that the Hole belongs to, and my entire UI (ListView, textboxes, gridview fo coordinates) are ALL updated by the existing XAML binding, and the Canvas is updated with one call to an existing method to regenerate the canvas.

To be honest, I can't believe I've figured all this out (with your help and others too, of course). It is such a cool feeling to have the vision of this this and see it come to be.

Check out the main code here:

void canvas1_MouseLeftButtonDown(object sender, MouseButtonEventArgs e)
{
    int ClickMargin = 2;
    Point ClickedPoint = e.GetPosition(canvas1);
    Point p1 = new Point(ClickedPoint.X - ClickMargin, ClickedPoint.Y - ClickMargin);
    Point p2 = new Point(ClickedPoint.X - ClickMargin, ClickedPoint.Y + ClickMargin);
    Point p3 = new Point(ClickedPoint.X + ClickMargin, ClickedPoint.Y + ClickMargin);
    Point p4 = new Point(ClickedPoint.X + ClickMargin, ClickedPoint.Y - ClickMargin);
    var PointPickList = new Collection<Point>();
    PointPickList.Add(ClickedPoint);
    PointPickList.Add(p1);
    PointPickList.Add(p2);
    PointPickList.Add(p3);
    PointPickList.Add(p4);

    foreach (Point p in PointPickList)
    {
        HitTestResult SelectedCanvasItem = System.Windows.Media.VisualTreeHelper.HitTest(canvas1, p);
        if (SelectedCanvasItem.VisualHit.GetType() == typeof(Ellipse))
        {
            var SelectedEllipseTag = SelectedCanvasItem.VisualHit.GetValue(Ellipse.TagProperty);
            if (SelectedEllipseTag!=null &&  SelectedEllipseTag.GetType().BaseType == typeof(Hole))
            {
                Hole SelectedHole = (Hole)SelectedEllipseTag;
                SetActivePattern(SelectedHole.ParentPattern);
                SelectedHole.ParentPattern.CurrentHole = SelectedHole;

            }
        }
    }
}

>>Are you asking how to find the collection, or how to handle the click.
>>
>>For finding the collection I would probably store it as a property of the hole.
>>
>>For the click I would use the PreviewMouseDown event on the ellipse.
>
>So you probably already read my reply where I said I had it working. And it does work perfectly, (except that it requires great precision with the mouse), but I want to ask this: is it really smart to add an event handler to EVERY ellipse that gets added to a canvas? Now I don't know what kind of memory bog that could be, or maybe it is a piece of cake for WPF and Windows to handle.
>
>In a practical case, I guess there would be not more that 30-50 holes even on a screen that had multiple patterns, but still; *FIFTY* event handlers? It just seems scary. And actually, each "Hole" is visually represented by two concentric circles and a text label (see the screenshow here: http://twitpic.com/1f2ci/full ), and I know the user would expect to be able to click on any one of those elements to select a hole. That means an event handler on 3 elements for every hole. Now we could be talking about 100 or more event handlers.
>
>It seems like there should be a solution where you could have just one event handler on the Canvas and read the element reference under the mouse, then work off of the .Tag property of that elment, and so on.