SPRINGFIELD — The delight was palpable. It spilled over when Violet and Lilly saw the Christmas tree in John Antone’s hand, and their happy laughter was followed by a spontaneous rendition of “Jolly Old St. Nicholas.”

And it wasn’t even a big tree. Ten-year-old Lilly Jacobs and her little sister, 5-year-old Violet Kissler, both stood taller. But it was the final touch of Christmas spirit for the family trying to make a home in Springfield.

“Oh, thank you!” Lisa Jacobs said when Antone and his wife, Rita, knocked on her door a week ago.

Jacobs, 29, a single mother of three, moved her family down from the Portland area to escape family difficulties last year, and hadn’t planned on having a tree for the holidays.

Money is tight

Her apartment is small and cramped, for one thing. For another, she doesn’t have a car. And she’s getting ready to attend Lane Community College next year, so finances are tight.

When her grandmother, Joanne Schuky, called a couple of weeks ago to say she’d sent presents to put under the tree, Jacobs told her the family wouldn’t be getting one.

Schuky, who lives in Ocean Park, Wash., wasn’t about to let that happen. She got on the Internet, looked up the Springfield Chamber of Commerce and told them of her granddaughter’s situation. The chamber called the St. Vincent de Paul Society of Lane County, and St. Vinnie’s turned to the Antones.

It’s the kind of call that John and Rita get every week as home visit volunteers for the Catholic charity.

The local St. Vincent de Paul is known for homeless shelters, affordable housing units and extensive recycling efforts, to say nothing of its secondhand stores.

But less well-known are its volunteers, about 100 locally, who do regular home visits to make sure those who are in need get taken care of.

Those volunteers represent a link to the charity’s beginnings in France more than 170 years ago, St. Vincent de Paul Executive Director Terry McDonald said. Back then, a young college student studying at the Sorbonne in Paris found himself in deep discussions with fellow students about the relevance of religion in modern times, McDonald said.

The conversation turned to the terrible poverty afflicting many Paris residents, and the idealistic students, led by Antoine Frederic Ozanam, concluded that they should do more than rely on the church to assist the needy, McDonald said.

The students got names of those who needed help from a local church prelate and began visiting people in their homes.

“They were bringing coal and wood to people in the urban east bank area of Paris in the 1830s,” McDonald said. Others took notice and began replicating the effort. Eventually the groups organized more formally, taking the name of the Catholic Church’s patron saint of poverty, St. Vincent de Paul.

By 1846, there was a group in St. Louis and, eventually, the society spread across the world. Today, it has hundreds of thousands of members in 130 countries on five continents.

“No work of charity is foreign to this society,” McDonald said.

But for all the high profile of the local St. Vincent de Paul, its home visit program operates in relative obscurity.

The Antones have been involved in the effort for about four years. They got started after learning about it through Rita’s grown son, who became a volunteer, John Antone said.

“That built a little fire,” he said. “It started a spark. The holy spirit finally got his hooks in me.”

Gift of time

The home visit volunteers offer something that few people, even generous ones, give: their time. And the Antones do it all year long. Once a week, they get a list of people in their neighborhood who need help, and every Saturday, rain or shine, the Antones make their rounds. They go to the homes, not to inspect them or make sure the folks who have asked for help qualify for it in some way.

“We’re here to make sure they know they’re not alone,” John Antone said. “Time is your best gift. That’s what makes it special.”

Over the years, the Antones have seen almost everything: homes with no furniture where parents and children were sleeping on the floor. Apartments crammed with stuff, including fancy big televisions where people said they needed help getting clothes.

They describe an alcoholic living in a 22-foot travel trailer who needed clean clothes so he wouldn’t be embarrassed when he went to his first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.

Antone smiled a little at that memory. What the man really wanted was advice on how to get his wife back, he said.