For Homeless, Christmas Brings Joy--and Big Letdown : Volunteers: During the holidays, donations pour into shelters. But soon after, the money and media coverage dry up.

Anthony Sloan remembers how the well-to-do suburbanites flooded into the Detroit Rescue Mission at Christmas, eager to help serve holiday meals to the shelter’s homeless men.

For Sloan, a recovering addict who lost his job, family and, finally, his home to drugs and alcohol last summer, the suburban volunteers and their donations helped make what was an otherwise grim Christmas season seem a little brighter.

“You get special food, and they bring lots of clothes, and there’s a holiday atmosphere,” says Sloan, who now does odd jobs around the shelter. “Any time they come, it’s a nice feeling.”

But most of those volunteers have not been seen since December.

“Some suburbanites come here once a year,” Sloan said.

It happens every year in America, almost like clockwork.

Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, attention is riveted on the plight of the homeless. Thanks to intensive media coverage and the country’s natural holiday preoccupation with family and home, the crisis of homelessness strikes a special chord with Americans during the Christmas season. Volunteers and donations pour into the nation’s homeless shelters as a result, often overloading the organizations with kindness.

“The shelters are so flooded at Christmas with volunteers that we end up with people standing around with nothing to do,” says Sue Marsh, executive director of the Massachusetts Coalition for the Homeless in Boston.

But during the bleak midwinter days after the holidays, homeless advocates and shelter officials complain, volunteers disappear, and the money and the media coverage start to dry up.

It may be just as cold in January and February--and there certainly are just as many homeless--but helping out at the local soup kitchen just is not as popular after Christmas, homeless advocates say.

“We see an amazing crush of activity through December, and then on Jan. 1, homelessness is cured,” says a bitter Mary Ellen Hombs, executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless in New York.

“Here in New York, there are just flocks of people at the shelters at Christmas,” Hombs adds.

“And today there’s nobody.”

In fact, the dominant public mood in the nation’s largest city seems to be growing resentment against, rather than sympathy for, the homeless. Now that the holidays are over, New York, like other big cities, has been caught up in a legal and ethical controversy over the rights of the homeless and of panhandlers in public spaces, most notably subway and train stations.

“I think altruism in general drops off,” after the Christmas season, says Kip Tiernan, who founded the nation’s first homeless shelter for women in Boston 16 years ago. “It makes them feel good to come in once a year and help. But then people tend to go back to their private lives.”

“Everybody suddenly, in about mid-November, decides that they should do something for somebody else,” says Violet Doliber, administrator of Family Haven, a shelter in St. Louis.

“Wonderful. But it is not a long-term commitment,” Doliber says.

One reason that cash donations drop off is that most people have less to spend after splurging on Christmas. Donors also push to get their money to charities before the end of the year, so they can take tax deductions.

So for many shelters and soup kitchens around the nation, the flood of contributions during the holidays has to be husbanded for the rest of the winter.

“Sometimes your budget is dependent on how you raise money over the holidays,” said Bill Faith, director of the Ohio Coalition for the Homeless in Columbus, Ohio.

Some who work with the homeless argue that America’s seasonal interest in the problem points up a national failure to come to grips with the magnitude of the crisis, which has worsened each year throughout the last decade.

The National Coalition for the Homeless now estimates that 3 million Americans are homeless, including 1 million women and children. Homeless shelters that once filled up only in the dead of winter now are packed throughout the year.

“My wish and hope would be that people would be at least concerned, if not outraged, about homelessness all the time,” says David Christiansen, executive director of the Harbor Interfaith Shelter in San Pedro, Calif.

“People don’t just get homeless at Christmas.”