SEATTLE — Yes, the Jewish Santa says, he knows people think it’s odd that a man who does not personally celebrate Christmas — not as a child, not as an adult — should dress as the holiday’s icon and ho, ho, ho as if it’s a primary language.

And true, Howard Cohen agrees, even some of his Jewish friends remain perplexed by the Kriss Kringlian devotion of this 53-year-old vice president of Clise Properties, this Rotary Club luminary, this Macher Claus.

He knows, and he does not care. This is a man, after all, who loves dressing as Santa and handing out gifts so much that he founded a nonprofit to help finance it, who chokes up years later when he talks about the severe burn patient whose nearly imperceptible twitch upon seeing the red, furry, fat man brought a roomful of family to tears.

“There he was wrapped like a mummy,” Cohen said. “Head to toe. He hadn’t really moved or acknowledged anyone. Then I did my best Santa Claus voice and said, ‘Ho, ho, ho. Merry Christmas.’

“He moved! His family starting crying. It got me hooked.”

Today, he’ll be back at it again, marking his 25th year as a hospital Santa. He’ll start in the morning with the 100 patients at Navos (formerly the West Seattle Psychiatric Hospital) and then on to Harborview for the 400 patients there. He’ll hand out hundreds of wrapped presents to everyone, unleash a blizzard of ho, ho, hos and disappear into the snowy evening, not to return for another year.

On the way home, he’ll become Howard Cohen again, the one who grew up poor in Mountain Dale, N.Y. The one who’s not terribly religious, barely celebrating Hanukkah and certainly not decorating for Christmas.

“We didn’t have a whole lot,” Cohen said. “My parents weren’t religious. I had my bris and my bar mitzvah and we’d light the Menorah, but that was about it.”

Neither Christmas nor Santa Claus was part of his childhood. But generosity to strangers was. Neighbors pitched in to send Cohen, sickly as a child, to New York for medical care. The gesture made an impression.

As an adult, he moved to Seattle in 1983. In 1984, a friend, a Jewish psychotherapist working at Harborview, told him he needed a Santa to visit some patients. As a lark, Cohen agreed. After the visit and on the way down in the elevator, a Harborview physical therapist named Missy Armstrong saw him in the elevator.

She grabbed him by the arm and said, “Come with me.”

She led this newbie Santa to patients’ rooms throughout the hospital. The reaction left him stunned. “I saw the power of the voice,” he said. “I saw how happy it made people.”

So the next year, elf and presents in tow, he returned. By the mid-1990s, he established a nonprofit, the Spirit of Giving, to help raise donations to defray the cost of hundreds of presents. For a while, he expanded his model to other cities, recruiting Santas to do similar work in hospitals elsewhere. He’s since cut back, as managing his Seattle effort is work enough.

By his own calculation, he distributed more than 100,000 wrapped presents over the years and visited 25,000 patients.