Win a $20 GC: 'Tis the Season to Feel Inadequate by Dorothy Rosby

This post is part of a virtual book tour organized by Goddess Fish Promotions. The author will be awarding a $20 Amazon/BN gift card to a randomly drawn winner. Click on the tour banner to see the other stops on the tour.

Why This Book is a Must Read

‘Tis the Season to Feel Inadequate is a collection of humorous essays about holiday stressors so instead of calling it a “must read” and heaping more pressure on you than you’re already feeling, I’ll call it a “you might want to read if.” For example, you might want to read it if you’re the only one in your neighborhood who hasn’t lit up your house like Clark Griswold. But that’s only because you can’t remember where you put the Christmas lights after you fell off the ladder last year.

Or if you regularly put off buying gifts until the last minute, which is why you picked up a dozen gift cards, two fruit cakes and an electric carrot peeler just before the mall closed last Christmas Eve.

Or if you won your company’s Ugly Christmas Sweater Contest last year without even entering and decided to wear a tank top to work on the day of the contest this year to avoid any confusion.

‘Tis the Season to Feel Inadequate is all about how we let our own and other people’s expectations suck the joy out of what should be a time of celebration. But not just at Christmas. We do it during other holidays and special occasions too. So you also might want to read ‘Tis the Season to Feel Inadequate if the only New Year’s resolution you made last year was to get your Christmas tree down by Valentine’s Day.

Or if you ever found yourself wondering if the five-second rule applies to the Thanksgiving turkey you dropped as you were moving it from the oven to the counter.

Or if you were ever overcome with the urge to lose 20 pounds, visit a tanning salon and maybe even have “a little work” done a week before a milestone class reunion.

Wouldn’t it be grand if we could all just give ourselves a break and enjoy holidays and special occasions whenever they are. ‘Tis the Season to Feel Inadequate aims to help you do just that. Oh heck, maybe it is a “must read.”

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.

Enjoy an Excerpt 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.]

About the Author:

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.

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Buy the book at Amazon or the audiobook at Audible.

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