Mr. Fab and I are starting to make plans for the holidays. Thanksgiving isn’t a big deal for either of us, but Christmas is, especially for me. After years of attempting to recreate my happy childhood Christmases and ending up disappointed, I finally gave up last year. Instead, we went out of town, just the two of us. We celebrated on Christmas Eve with a nice quiet dinner at a fancy restaurant, and then spent Christmas Day at the zoo. Honestly, it was the best Christmas we’d had for many years, and we vowed to make it a new tradition.

It’s easy to say that our (geographically and emotionally) scattered families have been the cause of our previous holiday gloom. But I know that, if we had children, things would be different. We would stay home with our little family and Christmas would (I imagine) be much like the Christmases of my memories. But without children, we find it hard to get into the spirit of the season or to muster our holiday cheer. That changed when we recreated the holiday to suit the people we are, rather than the people we used to be or wished we were.

The holidays are probably the hardest time of year for those of us without children. And this was brought home to me with great clarity recently as I was going over some of the posts and comments from the past three years of this blog. Alongside Kathleen (who writes Friday’s It Got Me Thinking… column) I’ve been compiling and editing a collection of some of these posts about the holidays, as well as some of the ideas and tips that readers have shared with us. As I sifted through the posts, I was struck by some of the struggles so many of us have and some of the solutions we’ve come up with to make it through this difficult season. I was also touched to see how this community rallies around one another when things get tough. It’s as if we’ve created our own family of understanding and empathetic friends, when so often our own families don’t get it at all. It’s a wonderful thing to see.

The result of all this sifting and compiling will be available next week in the form of an ebook we’re calling the Life Without Baby Holiday Companion. Our hope is that it will be provide inspiration and comfort at your fingertips when the holiday season gets tough. It certainly did for us as we were putting it together.

The ebook will be available on this site next Tuesday, November19 and on Amazon the following week. I’ll post details as soon as it’s up.