Holiday Gift Guide: Celebrating Disability Awareness
Our next gift guide this holiday season is all about disability awareness and advocacy. One out of every four Americans has some type of disability, and yet people with disabilities are still frequently overlooked and excluded by our society. We can all work together to change that, through big and small actions alike — including the things we buy and the places where we shop.
The ideas below will make great gifts for anyone with a disability and for the people who love them.
When ten-year-old Alyssa is diagnosed with the rare genetic connective tissue disorder Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, she vows not to let it stop her. Unfortunately, her efforts to avoid being “too sensitive” lead her to neglect not only her health but other aspects of her life as well. Twenty years later, she’s finally forced to confront the reality of her condition head on. When she finds herself tangled in an unwieldy combination of chronic pain, a library job for which she is particularly ill-suited, and her wife’s mystifying health problems, her body starts to unravel in ways she can no longer ignore. If pushing through is not the answer, what does homecoming to her floppy body even look like?
For more info visit Red Hen, and to purchase click here.
Floriography Child is a book about salvation: what gives people strength in the face of adversity, not just to endure, but to move through and beyond our myriad human sufferings. Through poems, micro-essays, and visual art, Floriography Child addresses fundamental questions about purpose, connection, and resilience. Written in memoir form, this book examines the mother-daughter relationship and its intimacies in the context of a daughter’s developing chronic illness. How to bear another’s suffering — how to find sustenance in a world fraught with uncertainty and pain — is addressed through the language of flowers and the natural world. Ultimately, this book asks us to consider how each of us, whatever our path, is connected.
For more info visit Red Hen, and to purchase click here.
Francesca Bell’s second collection of poems, What Small Sound, interrogates what it means to be a mother in a country where there are five times as many guns as children; female in a country where a woman is raped every two minutes; and citizen of a world teeming with iniquities and peril. In poems rich in metaphor and music and unflinching in their gaze, Bell offers us an exacting view of the audiologist’s booth and the locked ward as she grapples with the gradual loss of her own hearing and the mental illness spreading its dark wings over her family. This is a book of plentiful sorrows but also of small and sturdy comforts, a book that chronicles the private, lonely life of the body as well as its tender generosities. What Small Sound wrestles with some of the broadest, most complicated issues of our time and also with the most fundamental issue of all: love. How it shelters and anchors us. How it breaks us and, ultimately, how it pieces us back together.
For more info visit Red Hen, and to purchase click here.
What can we bear and what can we lift when a beloved, when our world, is light-struck and mad? The Bearable Slant of Light documents a web of clinical assessments, medications, the terrible beauties of delusion, and the fragile gifts of darkness. Poems that reach across the history of writers and artists who fought and sometimes lost their own battles against mental illness are set against the urgencies of our anxious world and the intimate struggle of one family.
For more info visit Red Hen, and to purchase click here.
Somedays self care can be as simple as just adding water. Get (or gift) pain relief with the warmth of this three-piece set featuring Magic Mud, Solace Soak, and Raspberry Relief tea.
Available for purchase here.
Just because others can’t see it doesn’t mean that it’s not hard AF some days. While no one has a right to know it all, if you want to make it clear there’s more than meets the eye, these pins were made just for that.
Available for purchase here.
Blankets always make a great holiday gift, as we settle into the colder winter months. And you can take that gift idea to the next level by giving someone you love a weighted blanket instead. Weighted blankets have been used by doctors to help provide comfort to individuals with a variety of conditions, including anxiety, depression, PTSD, OCD, ADHD, autism, dementia, Parkinson’s Disease, cerebral palsy, cardiovascular and metabolic problems, and so many others.
Available for purchase here.
The topic of inclusivity matters now more than ever. The toy industry, while slowly catching on in recent years, still tends to minimize the importance of “seeing yourself” and to downplay how this lack of representation plays out in a child’s life. WHO we see and HOW we see them makes a difference to a child’s emotional development and growth. If there is a child in your life you would like to give the gift of representation to, A Doll Like Me might be the perfect choice.
Available for purchase here.
When someone with a disability is running low on spoons (click here to read more about spoon theory), cooking a healthy meal can be a huge hurdle to overcome. Daily Harvest is on a mission to make meal time both easier and healthier. Why? Getting in 5 servings of vegetables daily can help us live longer on a healthier planet. Their chef-crafted foods are delicious, easy to prep, and built on the good stuff. From seed to plate, they’re committed to a better food system, one that prioritizes human and planetary health. They are transforming what we eat, what we grow, and how we grow it — one crop (and bite) at a time.
Available for purchase here.
