From time to time, we get the anonymous call or letter from someone who has read a story about The Honolulu Advertiser Christmas Fund, and we glimpse the ugly side of life.

Someone will inevitably ask why we are helping someone who has numerous kids and can't provide for them. We get cracks about birth control and personal responsibility and how disgusted these readers are that The Advertiser would choose to take part in this project.

Fortunately, these comments are few and far between, and are outweighed by the outright generosity of readers who look beyond the personal circumstances of the cases and realize it is human nature to care and to help. It is those readers I'd like to thank today.

It is gratifying that we can use our pages to tell the stories of those less fortunate and stir some hearts to give, as we have been doing since 1928. The stories speak for themselves, and this year, we were fortunate to have someone on staff eager to take on the assignment.

Mary Vorsino is one of our younger staff members, but in the short time she has been with us, she has impressed us with her interest in social-service issues and her passion for telling stories of those in need.

Before she started her assignment, she went back to read stories about the Christmas Fund published over the previous three years.

"They were all wonderful, and I was a little intimidated by the big shoes I would have to fill," she said. "I went into the fund, though, knowing I wanted to tell families' stories as they would tell them if they were the journalists. The stories had to be compassionate and thoughtful and striking, but they also had to be honest and accurately depict the real-life choices that impact people's lives."

Vorsino wrote about great-grandparents raising their great-grandchildren with their Social Security benefits, a family sleeping on wooden pallets in the back of a Kalihi warehouse, a family of eight living in a tent at Mokule'ia Beach Park and a mother asking for a playpen to keep the bugs away from her baby while he slept. Today and tomorrow will be Vorsino's final stories, and I urge you to look for them in the Hawai'i section.

The one assignment that struck her the most appeared on Tuesday. She introduced us to Rosnain Moth, who came to Hawai'i with her six children for a better life. Two more children — in their 20s — were left behind, one on Guam and one in Micronesia.

"The Moth family really touched me," Vorsino said. "Rosnain Moth told me she came to the Islands — from the Marshall Islands, but after a stay in Guam — to give her children a better education. To practice what she preaches, Moth has enrolled herself in an adult education course at Kapolei High School to learn how to write English and speak it better."

The families we chose to write about are nominated by social workers from nonprofits across the island. Their names are sent to the Community Clearinghouse with short biographies. Those biographies are forwarded to The Advertiser along with contact information so we can call the families.

We're encouraged when schools take on the Christmas Fund as a class project, or when company employees sacrifice giving each other gifts in order to donate. Our generous Anonymous Santa matches the first $25 of every donation, which helped us raise $218,000 last year, a five-year high. As of this writing, we have raised $123,000 this year, and our goal is $250,000, so we may fall short. We realize that in times of tragedy (Hurricane Katrina last year, the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 and the World Trade Center attacks in 2001) the amount we receive increases.

There's still time to give through the end of this year, so I am hoping we can get closer to our goal.

But the most important message is to tell you how much we appreciate your generosity. Even if we don't collect another dime this year, we have raised close to $1 million over the past six years for needy families just because you thought to help someone in need.

"I think the single most compelling thing about the Christmas Fund is that unlike other nonprofits, people can give money or toys or furniture to a specific family, one they learn about in the pages of our newspaper," Vorsino said. "Our readers may not see the faces or names of our Christmas Fund families, but they do read about their struggles and their pasts, and their plans for the future."

On this day before Christmas, what could express the sentiment of this wonderful holiday better than giving someone a future?