By Dorothy Rosby
“It’s the American way to create a celebration for everything, then turn it into a chore or worse, a nightmare,” says humorist Dorothy Rosby. Her fourth book, ’Tis the Season to Feel Inadequate: Holidays, Special Occasions and Other Times Our Celebrations Get Out of Hand” is a collection of humorous essays about how we let our expectations for holiday perfection get the better of us.
That goes without saying for Christmas and New Year’s. But Rosby doesn’t stop there, satirizing everything from Labor Day and Valentine’s Day to Friday the 13th and Leap Day as well as some off-the-wall holidays, like Use Less Stuff Day and Clean Out Your Refrigerator Day. Special events like graduations, weddings and class reunions also take a turn.
The book’s cover describes ’Tis the Season to Feel Inadequate as “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.”
Dorothy Rosby is a South Dakota author and humor columnist whose column appears regularly in publications throughout the West and Midwest. Her humor writing has twice received first-place honors from the National Federation of Press Women and this year she was named the global winner in the Erma Bombeck Writers Competition sponsored in part by the Erma Bombeck Writers Workshop in Dayton, Ohio. She’s the author of three other books of humorous essays.
All her books can be ordered through any bookstore and from Amazon in paperback and eBook versions. For the first time, Rosby has also narrated an audio book of ’Tis the Season to Feel Inadequate which will soon be available through Audible.