I've been doing a lot of work for one particular client over the past month, so much so that I broke my golden rule of not working five days a week in an office that wasn't in my home. Especially if the contestants from So You Think You Can Dance aren't involved.

No worries, all will return to normal in January.

But in the meantime, I've become involved in holiday-type office activities. The lunch out. The dollar-store gift exchange (you should see the magic mirror I received, it makes me feel like a princess!). And then I ended up getting volunteered to find a family for us to adopt for Christmas. Lesson learned: keep mouth shut at meetings.

So I contacted a charitable organization and we were assigned a family. When I received the email containing what they wanted I almost wept: there were only five things listed, all necessities.

We all looked at the list and brainstormed on what else we could add. We even got some boxes and put them in a common area so people could have a place to put everything.

For three days it was empty.

Then some of us brought in a few things. A few more items trickled in and on Thursday I was beginning to panic. There wasn't that much there and we were still missing two of their wishes -- and the stuff needs to be wrapped and ready to go on the 18th.

On Friday morning, the donations spilled out over the boxes and into the area surrounding them. The mother lode had arrived! Oodles of necessities to give their budget a break and some toys to keep the kids busy.

But that's not what made me cry.

I lost it when some people outside of our department came to me with gift wrap, ribbons and bows. They had seen the stack of loot, asked one of the designers what we still needed and picked up the trimmings. This allows us to put more money towards a grocery store gift card for the family's Christmas dinner.

That's what made me get a little weepy. Because they didn't have to do anything, but they did it anyway. So forget about all I said earlier this week about not finding my holiday spirit.

It arrived at around 2:40 p.m. on Friday afternoon.