The unseasonably warm weather in the weeks leading up to Christmas has not been all good news for Rhode Island’s needy.

Sure, heating bills are lower and the homeless aren’t facing life-threatening cold.

But, leaders of local charities say, Jack Frost’s absence has sapped some of the Christmas spirit that helps the poor during the holiday season.

“It’s so mild; people are not in the Christmas spirit,” said Maj. Robert Pfeiffer, state coordinator for the Salvation Army. “I have not felt the spirit that I have felt in other years. Scrooge has taken over.”

Pfeiffer said donations are coming in slower than he has ever seen in his nine years in the job. Normally, in addition to cash dropped in the familiar kettles outside stores, the agency receives a dozen or more checks a day in the mail. “Today we got two,” he said yesterday, “and there’ve been days we got nothing.”

He said donations are $50,000 below where he expected them to be in order to meet the agency’s $500,000 Christmas budget. “To be over $50,000 down at this point is an absolute nightmare,” he said. “I’m at wits’ end. I just don’t know what to do.”

The gap will be especially hard to make up this year, Pfeiffer said. Normally, Christmas Eve is the biggest day of the year for donations, but Christmas Eve falls on a Sunday this year and the Salvation Army does not solicit donations on Sundays.

The money collected during the pre-Christmas period, which started a week before Thanksgiving, pays for holiday projects, including providing meals and gifts, Pfeiffer said. This year, he has had to use money budgeted for other purposes to cover Christmas expenses. That means things may be awfully tight come the end of the agency’s budget year on Sept. 30.

“We are the agency of last resort,” he said. “They know if everything else fails, the Salvation Army will be there.”

Pfeiffer said he has all his kettles out with people ringing the bells alongside, so that has not been a source of the shortfall. He said the agency lost three spots from last year, primarily because stores that had allowed it to solicit donations had closed.

If it isn’t because of the warm weather, Pfeiffer is hard-pressed to figure out why people are not giving as much this year. “Rhode Islanders are very generous people; they really are.”

Besides ushering in the Christmas spirit, cold weather creates a sense of urgency, Pfeiffer said, adding that people seem to pity the bell ringers on cold days and drop more money in their kettles.

That sense of urgency is also something that Lisa Roth Blackman sees lacking because of the warm weather.

Roth Blackman is director of development of Crossroads Rhode Island, an agency that serves the homeless.

She agreed with Pfeiffer that Rhode Islanders are a giving people.

“People are generous and people want to help,” she said. “When people hear there is a need, they do respond.”

But because of the warm weather, they haven’t heard about the need this year.

Usually, by late December, a cold snap will hit Rhode Island and the media will be flooded with news of emergency shelters opening and features on the difficulties of being homeless when the temperature dips below freezing. This year, of course, those types of stories have not made headlines yet and donations have suffered.

“It definitely seems to be slower,” said Roth Blackman. “I don’t have hard statistics to back that up. We’re all sort of feeling like the phone isn’t ringing enough.”

The donation Crossroads seeks most is gift cards of any denomination to discount stores, supermarkets, drug stores and pharmacies. The cards provide flexibility to Crossroads staff in meeting the needs of the people they serve and it gives those people flexibility in choosing what they want or need, instead of accepting donated items that might not be the correct size or a favorite color. Gift cards also reduce the chances that a donation will be used to buy drugs. Roth Blackman said the most popular cards are from Wal-Mart, which has a wide variety of goods at prices that might help the donation go farther.

It also gives the agency’s clients, many of whom are families who are homeless for the first time, a sense of normality in being able to shop for themselves, Roth Blackman said.

Rosie Connors, senior director of development and communications for the Rhode Island Food Bank, said her agency has been struggling to catch up with a deficit from early in the fall that she said may be tied to all the attention the November elections commanded, diverting it from charitable causes. “We had a tough October,” she said, adding that November got better but that the agency is still struggling to meet demand. “If you come into the building, you’ll see empty shelves.”

The agency is hoping people shopping for their holiday dinners will buy a little extra to donate to the Food Bank.

Toys for Tots, the Marine Corps’ affiliated program that collects toys for children, got off to a rough start this year because the Postal Service decided it would no longer be a collection point for toys, according to Staff Sgt. Manases J. Cabrera. The program has already shifted from its collection phase to distribution. “We have managed to raise enough toys,” Cabrera said. Donations, though, are still welcome.

The Salvation Army can be reached at (401) 421-0956. Crossroads is at (401) 521-2255. The Food Bank is at (401) 942-6325. Cabrera can be reached at (401) 461-2471.