The last day of the month of November always seems to be my last free breathing, no stress day before the Christmas season starts.

Believe it or not, I have 39 non-demanding children. Not a one of them stress me out at Christmas, always happy when that day arrives, so obviously my stress is self-imposed. They don’t beg me for stuff nor make outrageous wish lists.

I fear not meeting everyone’s expectations that are so inflated by commercialism, but not demonstrated here. I know that my children, all adopted from the foster care system, have many memories of terrible Christmas times in years past, times with their abusive and neglectful former caretakers, times they’d rather forget.

It falls on me to replace those frightening memories with better ones. Yet I need to tone down the entire flashy atmosphere and remind my children why we celebrate Christmas.

One year I took 22 children to Disneyworld, using the money I’d saved up to buy presents, and we traded trinkets for a fun time. No one really remembers the stuff they got any Christmas, but that experience several years ago will never be forgotten.

Many years ago when I had 11 children at home we also went to Disneyworld on a cold December three day trip in Florida. We had a blast and all those children are now grown but that is the one Christmas that really stands out in their minds.

This year we’ve decided as a group to pool everyone’s gift money into as many e-machines as possible. We will never have enough computers here for everyone at one time, but we do need to up our quantity as some school nights there’s literally a line of kids needing PowerPoint and PowerSchool or Word documents.

My grown kids all come over on Christmas and we’ve made it as much about food and family as is possible. This year we’ve made a plan that everyone is happy about and is fairly stress free for someone like me that still needs to cook three times a day for 20 something kids that’ll be out of school for three weeks. I’ll still need to referee our usual adoption issues and conflicts; our regular life doesn’t dissipate for the holidays.

So in 25 more days I’ll breathe easy again.

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