COMMENTARY : Behind Jolly Ol’ St. Nick, There Is a Tale of Love

Santa Claus is big this year, really big.

He’s big every year about this time, but in 1994, Santa is especially big. Not only is there the usual Santa at Christmas stuff, but this year there are two new movies, “The Santa Clause” and a remake of the 1947 classic “Miracle on 34th Street.”

Santa Claus--a.k.a. St. Nicholas, Pere Noel, Father Christmas, St. Nick--is based on Nicholas of Myra, a sainted, 4th-Century bishop in Asia Minor. Santa’s common portrayal in red robes with ermine trim and floppy miter reflects his historic origins as a bishop of the church.

At various stages in his career, St. Nicholas was a patron of pawnbrokers, sailors, businessmen, traders and, of course, little children. This last function is the only one that has survived in modern memory.

Early in the myths attributed to St. Nicholas, he took on some of the characteristics of Wodin, the Germanic god. Hence he acquired reindeer, elves and a headquarters at the North Pole.

As patron of children, Nicholas was said to have brought them gifts on his feast, which is celebrated Dec. 6. However, in many countries this duty was transferred to Christmas, the preferred time for gift-giving.

The crusaders brought back to Bari, Italy, a body that the citizens of Myra said was that of St. Nicholas, though it is not unreasonable to suspect that it wasn’t the saint’s body at all. (Indeed, it is not unreasonable to assume that this most popular of all non-Biblical saints never actually existed, not that his story loses anything.)

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The good citizens of Bari claimed Nicholas as their patron and in time, after stories about him traveled to northern Europe, Amsterdam also claimed him as patron. When the Dutch founded New Amsterdam, they brought Nick along and made him patron of Manhattan Island, which, heaven knows, has need of a patron saint.

Santa is more for grown-ups than for children. When I was watching the remake of “Miracle on 34th Street,” the decision of the New York court to declare officially that there was indeed a Santa Claus was greeted with enthusiastic applause by all the adults in the theater.

It dawned on me that while children do enjoy Santa, grown-ups enjoy watching children enjoy Santa even more. The reason, I suspect, is not merely that adults delight in recalling the innocence of their childhood.

Playing the Santa game with kids, adults half hope that those innocent fantasies may actually reveal more about the meaning of life than does our own cynical realism.

To ask if there really is a Santa Claus is not the right question. The proper question is whether Santa Claus reveals, as every metaphor purports to, a reality beyond himself.

Does he reveal to us a God who loves all of us as his little children? If there is such a God, that is very good news indeed.

If this God loved little children so much that he himself became a little child at the first Christmas, that is astonishingly good news.

The Santa story is not simply a harmless tale that slipped from paganism into the Christian midwinter festival, but a metaphor that belongs at the heart of the Christmas celebration.

As Santa Claus gives gifts to children, so God gives gifts to us. The most fantastic thing about the Santa story is that it is true. And the story of St. Nicholas seems to become more popular every year.

Small wonder. Or maybe large wonder. The lives of saints are stories of God’s love. The Claus cause is a hard story to beat.

Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and sociologist at the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center.