And you think your Xmas is crackers!
Couple with 11 children prepare for a gloriously chaotic Christmas – with military precision, a sense of hum our... and a financial balancing act to foot the £3,000 bill
FOR many, the prospect of wrapping presents and getting ready for Christmas is already a daunting task.
But spare a thought for David and Alexis Brett, parents to 11 children, whose festive season takes on epic proportions.
With so many gifts to buy and mouths to feed, preparations – including buying a £65 turkey for their Christmas lunch – start weeks before the big day.
Even on Christmas Eve, it takes Santa five trips to and from a nearby relative’s house to deliver all the presents while the children are asleep.
The couple, from Dingwall, Ross-shire, made history when they became the first in Britain to have ten sons in a row, before finally having a girl in August this year.
Four months on from the birth of their daughter, Cameron, they are preparing for a bumper Christmas like no other.
Mrs Brett, 40, said: ‘With just three days to go, excitement is at an all-time high, with all of the wee ones asking about Santa constantly. We’ve had to keep all their presents in a room at their granny’s house or they’d be ripping straight into them.
‘Some years it’s been a struggle to get them in bed before midnight, then you’ve to try to get everything into the house while they’re sleeping.
‘We’ve actually been up with them since 3am once but I try to keep them upstairs until about 7am.’
She added: ‘We’re really looking forward to the big day. It’s a lot of hard work getting ready for it but it’ll be a little bit more special for us this year with our daughter finally here. It’s been lovely finally buying something for a girl.’
It was last Christmas Eve, as the family were recovering from a sickness bug, that Mrs Brett – who has spent more than eight years of the last 18 pregnant – realised there might be more to her queasiness when it appeared to linger longer than for everyone else.
A home pregnancy test confirmed the happy news but this time around the couple decided not to wait until the birth to find out the sex of the baby, and instead had a gender scan carried out privately at a clinic 50 miles away in Elgin, Moray.
The couple told the Mail on Sunday in September how Cameron’s arrival on August 27, weighing 7lb 2oz, marks the completion of their large family, which includes Campbell, 18, Harrison, 16, Corey, 14, Lachlan, 11, Brodie, ten, Brahn, nine, Hunter, seven, Mack, five, Blake, three, and Rothagaidh, two.
Christmas presents the boys hope Santa will bring range from a giant Lego set to an Apple Watch, a PS4 and a Nintendo Switch, while for little Cameron it is a play gym.
For the first time, the family will all be able to sit down together for their Christmas lunch. For years, two sittings have been held at meal times because the kitchen table was not big enough to accommodate everyone at once. But in recent weeks, the couple finally invested in a larger dining table, extendable to suit their huge brood.
As well as enjoying a turkey, bought from the local butcher and weighing in at a whopping one stone, they will have all the traditional trimmings.
The couple’s weekly shop, excluding clothes, already comes in at around £300.
Supplies include nine large boxes of cereal, 16 loaves of bread, 50 pints of milk, seven litres of diluting fruit juice and 100 packets of crisps, 30 apples, 25 bananas, 4.5lb of pasta and two tubes of toothpaste. For Christmas Day, however, as well as the turkey, they have added in two large bags of potatoes.
Then there are two bags of Brussels sprouts and three bags of carrots – not to mention 20 rolls of wrapping paper and five rolls of
Sellotape. The couple, who have been together since 1998, live in a detached five-bedroom home and the boys all share rooms.
For the time being, Cameron has a crib in her parents’ room.
Mr Brett, 45, a train driver, and Mrs Brett, a part-time fitness
instructor, are proud of the fact that they manage their large family without relying on state benefits.
Mrs Brett said: ‘When they see the number of children we have, some people think we must be on benefits but we’re not. David has a good job which means we don’t even qualify for full child benefit. We save hard when we can, but when it comes to Christmas we pretty much start preparing for it as soon as the last one is over.’
Usually, Mrs Brett’s day begins an hour after her husband goes off to work at 4.30am, when she uses the ‘quiet’ time to enjoy a coffee and a shower before the first of the children begin to emerge from their beds for nursery and school.
Not surprisingly, in just one breakfast sitting nearly two loaves of bread and a box-and-a-half of cereal are consumed. Astonishingly, the Bretts do not own a dishwasher and Mrs Brett does all of the washingup of the family’s dishes by hand.
In only one week, 80 showers and baths are also run, and the washing machine is loaded up around 49 times (or seven times a day). She also vacuums seven times a day – and is already on her second vacuum cleaner this year.
‘It’s not easy with so many boys running around, but I like everything to be neat and tidy,’ she shrugged. ‘I can’t stand mess.’
Mr Brett, who was diagnosed with early-onset Parkinson’s six years ago, is a hands-on father and shares the housekeeping duties around his flexible working hours.
Outside Christmas, which the couple estimates has cost them around £3,000 in total, the family’s monthly clothes bill comes to around £300, with at least three pairs of new shoes bought every few weeks.
Although the family have a seven-seater people carrier and a five-seater Range Rover, Mrs Brett cannot drive.
If they want to go anywhere as a family, Mr Brett has to complete a double journey.
Mrs Brett said: ‘We’ve finished wrapping 40 Christmas presents.
‘David and I do look at each other sometimes to say, “What have we done?”, but we could never imagine life with a small family now.’