Growing up in Jeannette, Michelle Hudson rarely knew a Christmas when stockings weren't stuffed with toys and presents didn't spill from underneath her family's tree.

As a young woman, she longed to be able to provide for her children the same way. But the realities of Ms. Hudson's life -- single motherhood, tough jobs, little money -- at times made a plentiful Christmas seem impossible.

She had her first daughter at 15 and left home three years later. She later gave birth to twins, but lost one to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. She watched her father lose his job and her mother grow weak from lupus. She got her GED and worked in personal care homes, struggling to stay afloat.

"I didn't see much hope for myself," she said.

She moved to Duquesne and had another daughter with her fiance, Antwon Hudson. There, she finally found a bright spot at the Duquesne Family Support Center, where parenting programs and mentors helped her set goals and find food, clothing and services she needed.

The couple and their daughters will spend Christmas morning in their apartment, grateful for the help they get from the Family Support Center, one of many local organizations providing toys to needy children this year, aided by readers of this newspaper.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's Goodfellows Fund, which supports Toys for Tots, works to ensure that children like Ms. Hudson's daughters -- Destinee, 10, McKenna, 5, and Savayea, 1 -- throughout Western Pennsylvania have toys under the tree.

Toys for Tots helped Ms. Hudson's family last year, supplying Savayea with a Cabbage Patch doll, a Glo-Worm and a toy drum set, which she pawed at one recent morning, her mother by her side.

"I could not have asked for more," Ms. Hudson, 26, said. "That brings a lot of joy to tons of kids."

At the Family Support Center, Ms. Hudson said she's found some joy of her own, as have countless other parents who have taken comfort in its services. The center offers family development specialists who help parents set and manage goals, classes on everything from nutrition to child development, and a variety of other programming, said Debra Squires, the center's director of family growth and child development.

The center also helps families meet their basic needs with an emergency food pantry. Ms. Hudson sits on the center's Parent Council, which she said has given her a vital link to the community. Family development specialist Brenda Miljus made Ms. Hudson feel welcome and confident, she said, and she has become a role model.

She wants one day to open her own day care center, and the support center, she said, has shown her a path to that goal.

"They help everyone with daily life," Ms. Hudson said. "The family center is my family."

Though toys will brighten her daughters' Christmas this year, Ms. Hudson said she wants them to realize that the holidays are about more than gifts, and that the greatest gifts of all cannot be purchased.

"I came from a family with money, but my circumstances are different," Ms. Hudson said. "I might not have tons of money, but I have my family, and there is not a day I can't wait to wake up to see what is going to happen."

Ms. Squires and Ms. Hudson said the joy Toys for Tots brings to needy children also is priceless.

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