'TIS THE SEASON TO FEEL INADEQUATE by Dorothy Rosby ~ Guest Post, Excerpt & Giveaway

‘Tis the Season to Feel Inadequate
by: Dorothy Rosby
Genre: Humor Essays
Release Date: October 3, 2022
Publisher: Unhinged Press

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.

As a syndicated humor columnist, Dorothy Rosby has been lampooning our celebrations in publications across the West and Midwest for more than twenty years. Join her in celebrating National Bicarbonate of Soda Day December 30—in case Christmas gives you indigestion.

Hi Dorothy! I'm a Christmas girl. LOVE CHRISTMAS!!! Seriously, I start thinking about it in July. What is your idea of an easy, stress-free Christmas?

I love Christmas too! And the question brings to mind a conversation I had with friends several years ago. We were having lunch and discussing the upcoming holiday. And one friend said she wished she could make Christmas as glorious for her kids as it was when she was growing up. I told her of course Christmas was happier when she was a child. She wasn’t doing all the cooking then. And I believe that. Cooking for a houseful of people is very stressful—for me anyway.

Another woman complained that she had to make something like 12 dozen cookies, three pounds of fudge and a pile of peanut brittle for gifts and holiday parties. I told her nobody has to make cookies. That’s what bakeries are for.

Several women said that reading other people’s holiday letters makes them feel like losers. One said she never gets hers written until January and the other said everyone who sends her a letter seems to live a perfect life. I reminded her that no one writes about all the projects they started and didn’t finish or about their credit card bills and speeding tickets. They include the highlights, not the low lights.

The point is, I think my friends are taking the fun out of the holidays by comparing themselves to other people and setting their expectations too high. I gave up on a perfect holiday long ago and I’m happier for it. Maybe it was the year my oven quit working right before I was set to serve Christmas dinner to a dozen people. Or the year I didn’t get my Christmas shopping done and wound up buying five gift cards and talking trout on Christmas Eve.

Or maybe it was the many years we struggled to wrestle our giant artificial tree up two flights of stairs and out of its box with my husband giving directions and me whining about them. Then we had to reverse the process after Christmas, quashing any goodwill we might have developed during the holiday season.

Whatever the case, no one who spends Christmas at my house would accuse me of spoiling the holiday with overly high expectations. For one thing, we gave away our artificial tree because it was sucking all the joy out of Christmas.

We don’t put Christmas lights on our house either. Some of my neighbors light up their homes like Las Vegas. It’s magnificent. I hang a wreath on our door. It’s not so magnificent. Do I let that make me feel inadequate? No, I do not. Anytime I want, I can look out my window and enjoy my neighbors’ lights. And bonus, I get a kick out of watching them put them up and take them down.

And when I’m tempted to let other people’s holiday letters make me feel dull. I just remind myself of some wise words I once heard: Compare and despair. I don’t want to be doing that during the holiday season.

Like my friend, I have fond memories of childhood holidays too. But when I get nostalgic about Christmases past, I remind myself that nostalgia is just the sense that everything was better if it happened so long ago I can’t remember it accurately.

To sum up, I think an easy, stress-free holiday is one where we stay focused on today, avoid comparisons and lower our expectations. Christmas is still Christmas if we serve cookies from a bakery and ham from a deli. It’s still Christmas if we run out of ideas and buy socks for everyone on our gift list. And it’s still Christmas if we forget to put stamps on our Christmas letters and they all come back postage due. In other words, we need to be kind to ourselves. We’ll need our strength for New Year’s resolutions.

from essay: Merry Christmas from the Envyofall Family

There are two things that make me feel like a boring person. Actually there are more than two, but the ones that come to mind this time of year are writing a Christmas letter and reading everyone else’s.

When I write a letter I come to the painful realization that the year has flown by and I’ve been terribly busy but I haven’t done a thing worth mentioning. Worse, when I read all the newsy holiday letters I receive I think the writers must have had more days since last Christmas than I had, and apparently more money, energy and ambition as well.

I don’t think I’m alone in my feelings of inadequacy either. Consider the following actual letter I made up. You’ll see in brackets what an unfortunate reader might be thinking as she reads this holiday greeting from the Envyofall family.

Merry Christmas from the Envyofalls!

We hope your year was as wonderful as ours was! [I’m pretty sure it wasn’t.] We started the year with a January vacation in Hawaii. [Now I know it wasn’t.] Since the children are both doing so well in school we decided taking them out for two weeks would be acceptable, and they enjoyed themselves thoroughly. [I’ll bet their teachers did too.]

In June Maxwell and I celebrated our twentieth anniversary with a month in Italy. [What a coincidence! My husband and I celebrated our anniversary in June too—at the Olive Garden.] You can see photos of both vacations on our family website. [You can see our vacation photos too—if my phone is working.]

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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.

Places to find Dorothy Rosby:

Website | Facebook | Instagram | Goodreads | Amazon Author Page

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