Let me tell you about my friends Michael and JoJo Dey, whose love epitomizes what the Christmas season is all about.

They are a typical middle-class couple; devout Christians, who don’t just talk the talk but walk the walk.

Just last week they finalized the adoption of a young boy named Daniel who, without their intervention, seemed headed for a life in which the odds would have been heavily stacked against him.

His father and mother were drug addicts. His father died when the boy was a small child. His mother has been in and out of jail since, and has spent much of the past three-plus years making life difficult for Michael and JoJo.

JoJo, by her own admission, is the rare Democrat in her Bible Study Group. But she and Michael are fervently anti-abortion, and believe society should care for unwanted children, not kill them.

The couple already has a daughter whom they adopted at birth 15 years ago. Michael works for the government and JoJo works part time as a marriage and family therapist. They are neither hard up for money, nor financially comfortable. But like seemingly everyone else, they worry about their retirement and ability to educate their daughter.

Daniel, who will be 10 next month, is the grandson of JoJo’s stepmother. Michael and JoJo had known the boy as an infant at family gatherings, but it is important to realize she and the boy are not related by blood.

While still a toddler, Daniel was removed by government officials from his parents’ custody three times because they abused him, and because of their drug addiction. Twice, the bureaucrats returned him to his parents’ care.

The third time, after Daniel’s dad died and the mother went to prison, the boy was dropped in the lap of his aging grandparents – JoJo’s dad and stepmom. They did the best they could, but they have serious health problems of their own. And, truth be told, they had trouble keeping up with an active young boy.

In 2003, Michael and JoJo realized that there was no one else for Daniel, and given their beliefs, it was time for them to literally put their money where their mouth was.

They knew that if they did not intervene, Daniel would either wind up with his mother when she finally got out of prison or become a ward of the state and enter the overloaded foster-care system.

In either case, his chances for a successful and happy life would be slim to none.

Over the next three-plus years they spent thousands of dollars on lawyers trying to adopt Daniel, not to mention their more than a dozen 850-mile round trips between their Maitland, Fla., home and Fort Walton Beach in the state’s Panhandle, where the courts that had jurisdiction over Daniel’s case were located

The Florida state bureaucracy and its judicial system have a bias toward keeping children with their biological parents. Michael and JoJo were swimming against the tide.

Daniel moved in with Michael and JoJo in 2003 when her parents could no longer care for him. Daniel is a nice, energetic child, but he is no angel, and needed the kind of loving discipline he had never before received.

Michael and JoJo are both in their 50s, so making sure Daniel went to school, did his homework; learned right from wrong and the meaning of the word “no” can be a physically and mentally exhausting task. And along the way they battled with the bureaucracy and, all-too-often, Daniel’s mother.

First, from prison, she agreed that Daniel’s adoption would be best for the boy. Then, when she got out, she hedged her bets. She would promise to come visit, but rarely appeared. She would disappear for months at a time without contact, but balked at signing away her parental rights.

Finally, in the spring of 2006, she disappeared and the courts ended her parental rights. Six months later, fittingly at Christmas time, the state of Florida allowed Daniel to be adopted by JoJo and Michael, who just as fittingly he calls “mom” and “dad.”

A pretty good Christmas story.