Marie Osmond — country and pop singer, movie and Broadway actress, dollmaker, author, businesswoman, TV and radio talk-show host, mom — has just settled into her room at the Comfort Suites in Aurora, Ill. She's on the phone, but she has to interrupt the conversation several times to talk to her children, who are bouncing off the walls.

"They love the hotels and the room service," she says. "But after 10 hours on a bus, they go crazy."

Aurora is the latest stop on Osmond's 15-city Christmas concert tour that began the day after Thanksgiving and will end with a finale in Salt Lake City's EnergySolutions Arena on Friday. The strain of the job is taking its toll on her voice. She excuses herself a couple of times to clear her throat and finally asks an aide for a throat lozenge. She eventually cuts short the phone conversation to preserve her voice and cancels the rest of the day's interviews.

"She's tired," says Chris Acton, her tour manager. "It's a lot of work. On Broadway, there's one show every night, but there's no travel. She performs, gets on a bus, makes the drive and gets up and does it again. You can hear it in her voice today."

This is another coming-out party of sorts for Osmond, who hasn't toured for 10 years, hasn't sung professionally for five years and has rarely appeared on stage during that time except for charity events. She has sat on the sidelines the past few years to raise her eight children and to tend to her dying mother.

In the interim, there have been marital separation and reconciliation, health issues for her and her husband, a fire that ravaged her Provo home, depression and the resulting flight from home, the death of her mother, and the growth of Osmond as a businesswoman.

Want to feel older? Marie Osmond is 47 years old. She grew up before our eyes, and here she is, middle-aged. When did this happen? There is a whole generation that doesn't even know her as the cute teen with the piano-key smile who cut hit records and hosted a TV show with her brother, Donny.

"A lot of kids only know me as the doll lady on TV," she says of her regular appearances on the home shopping network QVC, hawking her porcelain dolls.

Osmond and the rest of her "Magic of Christmas" concert entourage — musicians, her children, stagehands, etc. — have traveled from city to city on two buses. They began with four stops in Florida, then moved on to Raleigh, Louisville and, after inching along in snow and ice for 10 hours, arrived in Aurora.

They have performed mostly in theaters in front of sold-out crowds of 2,000 to 2,500 people, rather than cavernous basketball arenas like the one in which they will play in Salt Lake City.