Sunday’s column: Not your average holiday newsletter
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Happy holidays everyone!
It seems like yesterday when I was writing our last family holiday letter!
Well, it sure has been an action-packed year.
It started way back in February, when dear old Dad moved in after he was diagnosed with stage-three syphilis.
Apparently he’d contracted it in the service decades ago and paid no attention to symptoms from the first two stages.
Silly Dad! Isn’t that just like him?
He had no symptoms for years but they emerged with a vengeance in February.
The good news is, the docs at Carilion Clinic fixed him up with a really nice prosthetic nose. The bad news is, medical science hasn’t yet come up with a prosthetic brain – and Dad’s losing his mind.
On a shopping outing at Valley View Mall the other day, he asked me, “Who’s that fat guy with the white beard in the red clown suit?”
But his mood’s been great – much better than the usually grumpy old man you all knew. So we’re sure he’ll have a great time this season.
There has been LOTS more excitement on the FAMILY front!
I don’t know if you had heard, but Missy, 17, was doing great in her junior year at Patrick Henry High School.
She was getting all As in her advanced placement classes, and Dartmouth and Cornell sent us early-admissions come-ons because she aced the SATs.
Then she found out she was pregnant. Things kind of went downhill from there. She dropped out last April, but she’s the star pupil in her GED class.
The other good news is, the baby is healthy. We know from an ultrasound it’s a boy, and he’s due in January, and the doctors estimate he’ll weigh about nine pounds.
Right now we’re in a quandary as to choosing the most fitting name. Missy’s not quite sure about the identity of the father, or even his race. You know how extroverted she is!
Meanwhile, thank goodness for the WIC program, and the Blue Ridge Women’s Center.
I think I told you last year about Junior and his swimming scholarship at Tech, where he’s majoring in chemical engineering.
Last spring, he broke the ACC record for the 100-meter butterfly and it was only 4/100ths of a second off the mark of the last U.S. Olympics team. Needless to say, we’re so proud of him!
He got sidetracked this fall, though, when the cops raided his dorm room. They said they found a meth lab, but Junior swears he was experimenting on an analogue that’s not illegal.
The college suspended him anyway, so we had to hire Tony Anderson, one of Roanoke’s best criminal defense lawyers. He’ll try to get Junior off.
Problem is, the police also found a handgun in Junior’s room. He thought concealed carry was legal on campuses. So did I. Didn’t the Virginia General Assembly pass that legislation last year?
The Virginia Citizens Defense League is paying for a lawyer to beat that charge.
Then Junior can go back to Virginia Tech and train for the summer Olympics!
The lawyer’s retainer was $50,000, and all of you know that’s a tough nut for middle-class folks like us to swallow.
We would have borrowed against the house but we had already exhausted all its equity, what with dear old Dad’s syphilis and Missy’s unplanned pregnancy.
So now I’m driving a cab at night, after my day job, and that brings in a few extra bucks.
Through all this, my wife has been a real trooper. Everybody has always told her she looks 15 years younger than she is, and finally she’s capitalizing on that.
She went to work, too – as a dancer at local gentlemen’s club. She’s become that establishment’s most popular entertainer.
You should see the tips she brings home. She can barely fit all those dollar bills in her purse.
To wrap it up, wow, what a year!
- Dear old Dad is losing his mind but he has a new nose.
- Missy had to put off an Ivy League education for a few years, until she has the baby and is able to tell whose it is.
- Junior is out on bond, working at a ham store and facing 20 years in prison.
- I’m slaving 80 hours a week trying to make ends meet, while my lovely but lonely stripper-wife has many new and strange admirers.
I always say, a guy who can’t make eggnog out of a few rotten eggs is one sad character.
Heck, it’s the season, you know?
Happy 2011!
November 28, 2010 - 9:45 AM
The best thing that I have ever read in the Roanoke Times.. and I mean peroid. The sadder part of this that we all know people who are dealing with some of these things in real life. Knowing that you are joking helps to lighten the every day burdens. I always tell people about the time I made the front page of the Roanoke Times and I didn’t have to kill anybody. Kinda of funny how fame wains.
I thought it was a great satire of those frightful Xmas letters we’ve all gotten.
Satire? You mean it wasn’t real? I’m crushed!
Other commenters must have been in a cave for the last 50 years. This trite, predictable attempt at satire was a waste of newsprint and ink.
All in all, this was still a nice break from the run-of-the-mill holiday commentaries. You can only take so many feel-good letters about kids, relatives and pets. I’d like to treat Dan to an intensive pat down at our airport just to share our hands-on holiday cheer.
Great piece, Dan! I laugh uproariously at poor, misguided and duped souls such as Chris Connor. Your job is to get folks to read your column. Connor read it, “trite,” “predictable” or otherwise. Score? Casey, 1; Connor, 0.
You mean this is not real? Sounds like a weekend with my Alzheimer,stricken better half. It’s a terrible disease,however, redemption comes with a quick change of the subject!
Christmas letters rarely come off well. They’re impersonal and any positive thing sounds boastful. Although they seem like a great idea–just do a form letter so you don’t have to write the same thing to 100 people– they always come off as smarmy and stupid. I cringe whenever I get one.
I like getting holiday newsletters, and enjoy hearing what my friends and family members have been doing, although it goes without saying that surely somewhere between those positive lines something must have gone wrong, too. They can be trite but still strangely enjoyable–much like Reader’s Digest. But I LOVED reading Dan’s newsletter. It had me laughing out loud.
To the charge of trite-ness, I plead guilty. The column was a parody on something that’s trite. So it has to be trite — just like Tina Fey has to wear glasses and say “betcha” when she parodies Sarah Palin.
I’ve had at least 2 emails and 1 phone call from people wondering if I’m having a really bad run of rotten luck.
I’m kind of surprised by that. Even though I had dialed the published column back a bit from the original draft, I thought it was so over-the-top full of strange woes that nobody could even wonder if I was being serious.
Perhaps I should have instead written that I was moonlighting as a male stripper and raking in the tips. That’s such a ridiculous notion that NOBODY would have taken it seriously.
I think it was about here: “Right now we’re in a quandary as to choosing the most fitting name. Missy’s not quite sure about the identity of the father, or even his race. You know how extroverted she is!”
that I realized it wasn’t true…
We just send simple cards to friends and family…we hate getting anything more than that too, especially from people we never hear from except around the holidays, as if they’re sending a reminder that they’re expecting a Wal-Mart gift card from us.
We get holiday newsletters from the same 3 or 4 people every year. A couple of them are usually boring bragfests, but a couple are usually entertaining and informative. So it’s a mixed bag with us.
We are sending a postcard.
I was surprised and elated when I saw this article. I am Dan’s oldest daughter and remember joking about this during a family car trip up to Maryland one Christmas. I will say that this article is MUCH more tame than the tale that we concocted. If he had printed half of the things we came up with, I hope there would have been no doubt it was untrue! There are few dull moments in the Casey household though – just ask my dad about last year’s holiday dinner conversations!
Caitlin is 23. She earned her BS in economics from George Mason University when she was 20, and she’s been on her own since then. She’s now living in San Diego.
Love you, Cait!
OK, Dan, ‘fess up about “last year’s holiday dinner conversations!”