'Tis the Season to Feel Inadequate: Holidays, Special Occasions and Other Times Our Celebrations Get Out of Hand : Humorous Essays by Dorothy Rosby Book Tour with Guest Post & Giveaway

  

'TIS THE SEASON TO FEEL INADEQUATE

Dorothy Rosby

 

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GENRE:  Humorous Essays

 

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BLURB:

 

 

Christmas comes but once a year; chaos never ends! Happy Halloween, merry Christmas and joyful Lumpy Rug Day. That’s real, by the way. Lumpy Rug Day is celebrated every May 3, though “celebrated” might be too strong a word. It’s the American way to create a celebration for everything, then turn it into a chore or worse, a nightmare. ’Tis the Season to Feel Inadequate is a collection of humorous essays about how we let our expectations steal the joy out of Christmas and other holidays and special events. It’s understanding for those who think Christmas form letters can be honest—or they can be interesting. And it’s empathy for anyone who’s ever gotten poison ivy during Nude Recreation Week or eaten all their Halloween candy and had to hand out instant oatmeal packets to their trick-or-treaters.

 

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EXCERPT

Excerpt from Essay: Cooks in Crisis

 

Every year while I prepare our Thanksgiving meal, such as it is, I tune into the annual live call-in show, Turkey Confidential, on National Public Radio. Food experts talk turkey about all sorts of dishes I’d love to gobble up.

 

And on the biggest cooking day of the year, Turkey Confidential guests come to the rescue of cooks in crisis across America. I’ve never had the nerve to call them myself, though I’ve had my share of cooking crises, and not just on Thanksgiving. But there are a few calls I could have made over the many years I’ve listened to the show.

 

1. Help! My goose is cooked but my turkey isn’t. I told my guests we’d eat at noon. Then I told them one. It’s now two. The relish tray is empty and someone sampled the pumpkin pie, but the turkey juices are far from clear and the little pop-up thingie shows no sign of popping up. Opening the oven every five minutes to check probably isn’t helping.

 

I should have seen this coming. Our turkey wasn’t quite thawed even after it sat in our fridge for four days, maybe because our refrigerator runs a little cold. That usually isn’t a problem since I mostly just use it to make ice cubes.

 

If that weren’t bad enough, our oven has been running a little cold too, maybe out of sympathy for the refrigerator.

 

My question is, should I go ahead and serve my guests leftover tuna casserole now and have the turkey as a bedtime snack? A lot of people sleep after Thanksgiving dinner anyway.

 

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GUEST POST

Topic: Please share a favorite Christmas memory

            The Christmas of 2017 was one of my most memorable ever thanks to a certain guest we had that year. His name was Stanley.…Flat Stanley. He came to us in the mail, which I realize is an unusual way for a visitor to arrive. He was around eight inches tall and paper thin. He was quiet, but he smiled a lot. In fact, he smiled no matter what happened to him. And a lot happened to him during his Christmas vacation with us.

 Maybe you’ve hosted Stanley yourself. He’s a paper doll based on a children’s book by Jeff Brown. Classrooms everywhere use Flat Stanley paper cutouts in educational projects. Students send him to friends or relatives and after his visit, hosts return him with a journal and photographs of his adventures. At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work.

My niece the kindergarten teacher sent us Stanley shortly before Christmas. He came without a stitch of clothing, so our first job was to dress him. My husband colored him with magic markers and we set off to show him how we celebrate Christmas.

We photographed Stanley at every stop we made along our eight-hour drive to visit relatives for Christmas. We got some curious looks from other tourists when Stanley and I posed next to an interstate rest stop, but if Stanly was embarrassed, he didn’t mention it. 

Once we arrived at my in-laws’, we showed him the sites of their town. He had the time of his life, though he never actually said so.

The first clue that we weren’t cut out to be host parents might have been when I dropped Stanley face down in the snow during a photoshoot. He wasn’t hurt, but the ink on his shirt smeared. I felt bad about it, but he didn’t seem to mind.

Then we forgot him in the car on Christmas day. He was alone, cold and hungry while we sat inside eating traditional Scandinavian fare. He never complained. Maybe he doesn’t like lefse and lutefisk any more than I do.

After Christmas, we traveled to visit my family. Again, we photographed Stanley at every stop along the way. He’s very photogenic, except on windy days.

The museum we visited was filled with great photo ops. Stanley posed by statues, animals, and various modes of transportation. And that’s when tragedy struck.

Stanley had posed debonairly against the window of an antique car, but just before we could snap photos, he lost his balance and fell into the crack between the door and the window. Someone screamed, but I don’t think it was Stanley.

Just like that, he became part of the museum’s permanent collection, but a part that will never be seen again, unless there’s another sequel to Night at the Museum.

I was devastated. But my relatives, clearly better hosts than we are, came to the rescue. They enlarged one of the photos we’d taken and printed a new Stanley. And it was actually better, though I’d never say that to the old one. They printed him on card stock so he was sturdier. And they used a photo taken before the snow mishap, so his shirt wasn’t smeared. Plus, they made us a couple of spares, just in case. 

When we wrote up the notes about Flat Stanley’s Christmas vacation, we left out the parts where he suffered, and the new Stanley probably didn’t mention them either. Discretion was one of his many fine qualities.  

When he arrived at his kindergarten after Christmas break, the students may not have even realized he was a clone. But if they looked very closely, they would have noticed that he was slightly taller than he had been when he left and that he was definitely stronger. Hard times will do that to you. So will card stock.

 

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AUTHOR Bio and Links:

 Dorothy Rosby is an author humor columnist whose work regularly appears in publications throughout the West and Midwest. Her humor writing has been recognized by the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, the National Federation of Press Women and the South Dakota Newspaper Association. In 2022 she was named the global winner in the Erma Bombeck Writers Competition in the humor writing category. She’s the author of four books of humorous essays. 

 

Website: https://dorothyrosby.com/

 

https://www.facebook.com/rosbydorothy

https://www.goodreads.com/dorothyrosby

https://www.instagram.com/dorothyrosby/

 

Amazon   https://www.amazon.com/dp/0578295520

 Audible  https://www.audible.com/pd/Tis-the-Season-to-Feel-Inadequate-Audiobook/B0CBW57GYM

 

 

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GIVEAWAY 

 The author will be awarding a $20 Amazon/BN gift card to a randomly drawn winner.

 

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