A Santa Claus to believe in.

MOST OF US HAVE A SOCIAL WAY IN which we usher in the Christmas season. A friend in Texas carries on her husband's family tradition of filling a beautiful crystal bowl with bright red apples. A neighbor of our welcomes the season by unpacking her collection of Santa Claus figures.

Many of us begin to feel Christmas in the air when we bring out the Advent wreath or set up the nativity scene. In our family, the Christmas season begins late at night, December 5th. As we head for bed, we each take one of our shoes and leave it outside the door of our room to be filled by Saint Nicholas, whose feast day we celebrate on December 6th. On the morning of Saint Nicholas Day, we awake to find the shoes filled with candy, and sometimes a small toy or a Christmas book.

Very little hard data is known about Saint Nicholas. He was born in the fourth century and was the bishop of the city of Myra in the province of Asia Minor. For other information about this saint, honored by both Eastern and Western Christians, we depend upon legend. The most commonly told story about Saint Nicholas involves a father, his three daughters, and a bag of gold. The father, it seems, was a poor man whose daughters were all of a marriageable age. Because the family was so poor, the father was unable to provide dowries for his daughters. Careers for women in the fourth century were, according to the legend, limited to marriage or prostitution. Rather than see these young women choose the latter course, Saint Nicholas hid outside the family's home one winter night and tossed a bag of gold through the open window, and, thus, the young women were able to marry and live happily ever after. What a satisfying story!

When we honor Saint Nicholas on December 6th, we have an opportunity to do some subtle teaching as we celebrate. As Christian parents who ask our children to share our faith in the Eucharist or Christ's Resurrection, for example, which cannot be proved by reason, we have in Saint Nicholas an opportunity to talk about Santa Claus. We can, in good conscience, tell our children that Santa Claus is indeed real because Saint Nicholas was, after all, the original Santa Claus. We can talk about being followers of Jesus. Christ's coming to earth, as he did on Christmas morning, was an act of generosity. Saint Nicholas, as a follower of Jesus, was a generous person, and those of us who seek to follow Jesus will work to be generous as well.

As we prepare to celebrate Christ's birth, the feast of Saint Nicholas reminds us of the value of small deeds done for the good of others. It also reminds us to stay focused on two important concepts.

1) Small deeds ("I am not Martha Stewart, I am not Martha Stewart, I am not Martha Stewart"): the best Christmas memories are usually not about things. When I think about best loved Christmas memories, I remember the sound of my uncle's voice as he, a priest, arrived to pick up my brothers who served the midnight Mass he celebrated at a local home for pregnant unmarried teenagers. And while we had spectacular Christmases, my favorite things received were usually the tiny trinkets--little bars of soap, pieces of ribbon candy--that my mother tucked in our Christmas stockings. What was charming about these things was the thought that went into them.

2) The good of others: Christmas is a time when all the senses seem fine-tuned. The needs of others, while present all year, seem especially poignant at this time. Christmas is a good time to give ourselves and our children, if we have children on hand, the gift of giving to others.

I am grateful to my parents for the gift they gave us those many Decembers ago when they taught us about the feast of Saint Nicholas. This December, my daughters Kate, Martha, and Molly will all place their shoes near their bedroom doors--though at this stage of our family's life, the smallest shoe will be sixth-grade Molly's size 7 Nike. I'll mail Annie's candy to her college postal box, and I'll send Maggie's to the house she's renting in Alabama as she pursues her Ph.D. And, perhaps best of all, all of us here will give special thought to what to send to my son, Tom, and his wife, Coleen, as 2-year-old Gabrielle puts her own little shoe outside her bedroom door. Merry Christmas to all.