They appeared one by one, like ghosts emerging from the surrounding darkness, the frosty white puffs of breath emanating from their mouths testament to the subzero air around them.

Shortly before 6:30 p.m. on a frigid night just before Christmas, a heavy-set man wearing a worn, dirty tan coat, a stocking cap smudged with oil or grease or God knows what and jeans badly frayed at the bottom of each leg appeared outside Sojourner House, a downtown Eau Claire homeless shelter at 618 S. Barstow St.

A moment later a tall, thin man lugging a backpack stuffed with his few belongings, half-lit by the yellow-orange haze of a nearby streetlight, showed up in front of the shelter. He was followed by another man donning only a drab gray sweatshirt, thread-bare pants with a hole in the right knee and light-brown work boots, untied laces dragging on the snowy sidewalk.

A disheveled-looking woman bundled against the cold ambled awkwardly in their wake, her scraggly gray-blonde shoulder-length hair partly covered by a multi-colored hat and a tattered secondhand scarf that had seen too many winters.

Others joined this small crowd, one by one. At 6:50 p.m. they huddled in a group of about 20, shielding each other from the biting breeze, eagerly hoping for one of the coveted spots inside the shelter and out of the arctic air around them...