The holiday season is upon us. Raise your hand if you’re less than thrilled. Growing up, my parents had all kinds of holiday traditions that I figured I’d carry on one day with my own child. My mother read us a Christmas themed book every day until Christmas and we received small gifts that were tucked into the pockets of the advent calendar. There was the large family Christmas party on my mom’s side with a slew of cousins of all ages on the Saturday before Christmas and Christmas Eve dinner at my paternal grandparents’ house with silver taper candles on the table, mistletoe, and a fire burning in the fireplace. We received new pajamas to wear to bed on Christmas Eve and my dad had a special style of handwriting that he painstakingly squeezed onto the tags of the gifts from Santa.

Every year, I look at the advent calendars in the stores, consider buying one, and then decide to wait until I have a child in the house to purchase one. A few years ago, I had a melt down in the Christmas aisle in Kohl’s as a result. I have a large collection of ornaments that I usually can’t wait to get out of storage and unwrap. I love them because they’re all like tiny pieces of art. However, the past couple of years, I’ve downsized, getting a small table top tree and only displaying a small amount of them, or just doing a garland on the fireplace and no tree at all. I just don’t feel like I have the energy to deal with it all. Infertility has drained so much of it from me.

So, in an effort to start some new traditions of my own, a child in the house or not, I decided to do a limited edition, commemorative ornament making kit for ART of IF. My hope is that we’ll have a different kit each year and it will be an opportunity for me, and those of you who would also like to participate, to set aside some time and space for creative expression around the holidays and have an outlet for some of the less than comfortable feelings that come along with them.

The kits come with everything you need to make the ornament. In this case, the shatterproof plastic bulb (safe for fur babies and human babies alike), strips of paper, ribbon, a metallic silver pen, step by step photo instructions, and a list of ideas for what you might like to write on the strips before curling them up and tucking them inside. They’re available in our ART of IF colors in either shades of blue, or shades of red and are $10 each plus shipping and handling. We have 50 kits available and you can buy them until they are gone. However, if you’d like them in time for Christmas, please submit your order by December 10. You can fill out the order form here. The money that we make will go back into the project and used toward our mission of raising awareness about infertility and providing creative outlets to those dealing with the disease.

Hang in there! Together, we’ll make it through.

Elizabeth