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By The Dozen:
http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
ARE YOU SPENDING the weeks left before Purim trying to costume and entertain
your only child? Is it taking hours to find enough old clothes to dress your
two urban kiddies for the carnival? Do you feel surrounded with just three
junior Esthers and Mordechais? Well, imagine having five, or eight, or even a
dozen of the little rompers to manage.
No thanks, eh?
My daughter and her female classmates spent the weeks before Purim
conducting a food drive and, boy, are they glad it's over. They put
collection boxes in every classroom, from nursery to eighth grade and hung
posters asking children to donate kosher, pareve, non-perishable groceries.
On Purim, she will distribute special "Shalach Manos," holiday food
packages. When those of us who can afford it exchange our festive small boxes
of cakes, fruit, candy, wine, and other goodies, it's a lark, and lots of
fun, part of the mitzvah of Purim. But when the goodie bag becomes a grocery
bag for families who have to struggle to pay for every meal, the mitzvah
grows to cover both the fun of Shalach Manos and the serious obligation to
give to the poor.
My daughter and her buddies collected 368 food items: cans of vegetables
or fruit, boxes of soup mix, packages of cookies, tins of tuna and salmon,
mounds of food. We carted it all over to the lady's home and set up an
assembly line in her driveway. Our collected food provided Purim week
groceries to fill ten boxes, one each for families with large numbers of
children. We all enjoyed the thought that our work meant a big batch of
groceries for these hard up families; our kids were glad that their kids
could celebrate a bit also.
When I looked closely at just one mound of driveway packages I became
newly aware of the sheer volume of stuff it would take to keep eight or ten
children going. I thought about the ton of groceries I haul home each week
just to keep my three kids in peanut butter and fruity yogurt.
Jewish World Review Feb. 28, 2000 / 22 Adar I, 5760
Purim Packages
By Erica M. Rauzin
They worked with a wonderful woman in our neighborhood who runs a program
to feed the hungry. Her program feeds mostly Jewish people, old and young,
immigrant, unemployed, infirm, or just down on their luck, including several
very large families. 
It was all I could do to muster Purim for three. We have one daughter who wavered between being too dignified for a costume and being old enough at last to wear high heels as part of a Vashti get-up. We have a little boy who wanted to be "Mordechai dressed like a cowboy." We constructed a cowboy get up, complete with bandanna, jeans, fringed shirt and boots. We told our 'lil pardner that he couldn't have a gun and that adding a hint of Mordechai to his western gig was up to him. He managed it by persuading his sisters to paint a beard on him.
Then we have the daughter for whom Purim would have to be invented if it
didn't already exist. She wore one costume for the Wednesday night Megillah
reading, another for the 
Thursday morning carnival and a third for Thursday
dinner, a festive "seudah" (meal). She was Esther each time, of course, but
once in sequins, once in silver, and once in pink with netting. If she were
my only child, she would be enough of a holiday handful to make the idea of
kids by the dozen extremely daunting, despite my admiration for those who
manage more.
As we headed off to the carnival, I gratefully clustered my three point
zero kids around me—high-heeled Vashti, cowboy Mordechai, and Esther in a
tutu—and thought that no Mom, even one with three times as many kids, could
conceivably feel any more blessed. And, as I was pondering all that so
sentimentally, Vashti complained that Esther was making faces at her, and
Esther decided she wanted Mordechai's bandanna, and Mordechai pulled off
Esther's crown, and things got back to normal. A dozen of them? Well, L-rd,
I'm afraid it would be more blessing than I could
