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by Stephanie Piper

Back in the olden days when I worked for a newspaper and wrote features for a living, the holidays offered a particular set of challenges.

The first was originality. Come December, the story ideas floating around the newsroom were as stale as last year's gingerbread house. Holiday depression. Holiday diets. Nifty gifts for under $25. Show me a feature writer who hasn't done the pets-at-Christmas story and I'll show you a slacker.

The second major hurdle was sentimentality, the built-in hazard of holiday writing. What reporter among us has not veered occasionally into Hallmark territory, home of teary reunions and abandoned puppies that end up under the tree?

Nowhere was this hazard more apparent than in the annual Milk Fund stories. The Milk Fund, a charity founded and then-sponsored by the old daily Knoxville Journal, bought milk for needy families. Each December, every Journal reporter was assigned an MF story. You went out and interviewed lucky milk recipients, then wrote a minimum of 10 inches about their plight and their endless gratitude. The stories ran on the front page, so there was no question of dashing off a few mediocre paragraphs and hoping no one would read them.

It's hard to write about poor people at Christmas without sounding pathetic or saccharine. I did my share of forgettable pieces and wished my copy could run without a byline.

In my fourth year of MF stories, I drove to a two-room shack on an unpaved road. It was home to a single mother of an enormous number of children, all of whom appeared to be under the age of six. They were clad, on this winter day, in ripped shorts and sagging diapers.

I sat on the couch and opened my notebook. I was supposed to ask this woman why it was important for her to get the free milk. I was supposed to get a usable quote and enough material for my 10 inches and leave.

But as we sat together in the cold little room, two things became clear. Milk was not going to do the trick here. And I was not going to make this woman tell me how poor she was.

We talked about the kids and what they wanted for Christmas. We talked about how she once had thought of becoming a nurse. We talked about the weather and how it might snow later.

I went back to the paper and sat at my computer. Then I told a friend in features about what I had seen that morning, and she told the cop reporter, and he told the sports guys. At the end of the day, they handed me an envelope.

We bought enough groceries for a week and presents for the kids and sweatsuits for all of them. They got the free milk, too.

We loaded the stuff in someone's van and drove it out there. The woman looked bewildered. The children tore open bags of cookies and stared at us. There was nothing sentimental about the moment. It was, to quote Roy Blount, "life its own self."

As for my MF story, it wasn't much. Sometimes, you just have to be there.