The Tacky Christmas Letters

By Joyce Armor

If you dread receiving any of "those" letters in your Christmas cards, you'll be pleasantly surprised by The Tacky Christmas Letters. A collection of 30 years of holiday letters, the quirky epistles follow the foibles and ups and downs of a family through love, divorce, numerous trips to emergency rooms, travels and travails. The one constant through these adventures is humor, brought to you by a former TV sit-com writer and author of many traditional and e-books.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Joyce Armor
• Release date: Dec 10, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463641088

Joyce Armor

I knew from the age of 8 I wanted to be a writer. I was 15 when I wrote a scintillating short story targeted to the confession magazines, my first attempt at getting published. Alas, “Drunkenness Cost Me My Womanhood” was rejected. In the next decade, I fed my need to write by penning long letters (a dying art), Christmas card notes, English essays and term papers.Armed with a degree in English, I was tending bar in a Las Vegas casino (long story) when I had an epiphany: I would do everything in my power to become a TV writer. Two weeks later I was living in L.A., and a few months after that, I landed a job as a production assistant at MTM, where I learned from the inside how to write and rewrite scripts. In partnership with another P.A., Judie Neer, I started writing spec scripts. Finally one was accepted by “The Tony Randall Show.” Over the next several years we were freelance TV writers, with credits including “The Love Boat,” “WKRP in Cincinnati” and “Remington Steele.” Then we both got married and started birthing babies. My little family left the L.A. smog for a small town in northern California.Over the next two decades, I wrote a parenting column that won a national award, several books (Letters from a Pregnant Coward, The Dictionary According to Mommy, What You Don’t Know About Having Babies), children’s poetry (in Kids Pick the Funniest Poems and other anthologies) and plays produced in community theaters.I also got divorced and moved my two sons across the country to Myrtle Beach, SC. There I wrote hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles and columns and co-owned a regional business/lifestyle magazine.Several years ago I moved back to Ohio from whence I began, where I enjoying hanging out with family and old friends, including the same group I ate lunch with in the cafeteria in 7th grade. Since returning to my roots, I’ve read more than 1,000 romance novels and novellas. Many I loved, some I felt “enh” after reading and others I wanted to reach into the book and hit at least one of the protagonists with a brick.That’s when I decided to write my own romance novels and novellas, the kind I wanted to read, with smart, funny protagonists; and interesting (to me, anyway), not overly complicated plots with conflicts not so contrived they make me want to gnash my teeth. You might disagree, and all I have to say about that is different strokes for different folks. My youngest son once told me he absolutely hated English classes because with math, 2+2 is always going to be 4, but judging writing is so subjective. In my younger years I might have turned myself into a pretzel trying to fit my writing into some publisher’s niche. Not happening anymore. Now I’m writing for me, in my own unique voice.I’ve always been a much better writer than a salesperson, hence the e-publishing route. And I’m basking in the control. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Book preview

The Tacky Christmas Letters

Copyright 2019 Joyce Armor

Smashwords Edition

Cover: Villa Designs

Trusty Reader: Chris Gale

Expert Formatting: Jesse Gordon

The Tacky Christmas Letters

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written consent of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

The Tacky

Christmas Letters

Joyce Armor

Table of Contents

Copyright

Title Page

Forward

December 1990

December 1991

December 1992

December 1993

December 1994

December 1995

December 1996

December 1997

December 1998

December 1999

December 2000

December 2001

December 2002

December 2003

December 2004

December 2005

December 2006

December 2007

December 2008

December 2009

December 2010

December 2011

December 2012

December 2013

December 2014

December 2015

December 2016

December 2017

December 2018

December 2019

About the Author

Forward

I began sending Christmas cards while attending college in Ohio. Later, when I moved to Florida, then Nevada, then California, I wrote long notes on the cards each year to bring family and friends up to speed with my life.

Then I got married and had a couple of babies and had surprisingly little time to write Christmas cards. That’s when I started buying smaller and smaller cards so I wouldn’t have to write as much. A few years into raising my two sons, I finally threw up my hands in frustration and wrote one of those tacky one-size-fits-all holiday letters.

Over the years, ones of people (as opposed to hundreds or thousands of people) have requested that I publish my Christmas epistles. I finally bowed to this enormous pressure, and here they are—the last 30 years of the dreaded Tacky Christmas Letter.

December 1990

Dear Friends, Relatives & Countrymen:

The only thing worse than sending out one of those Christmas letters is having the audacity to send it late. Yeah, well…that’s pretty much the kind of year it’s been. The highlights of December alone include Brady getting stitches in his forehead (that’s the last time he’ll tell Dylan to toss him a baseball bat when he’s up a tree), our dogs defoliating the Christmas tree and discovering the spot behind the sofa where Dylan has been spitting out his vitamins for the past year.

If I haven’t dropped you off my Christmas card list yet, I must not be rich and famous like I’m s’posed to be. No new books published this year but my claim to fame is that Garrison Keillor’s agent (whether I can spell his name or not) is trying to sell my novel, Sperm Wails. Sounds good but try to make a car payment with that information.

If the term starving artist holds any meaning for you, you’ll understand why I finally—after lo these many years—had to go out and get a real job. Well, sort of. I’m working at Rip Off Press, publisher and/or distributor of underground comic-book classics such as The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Zippy the Pinhead and Leather Nun. Have I found my niche or what?

Brady is in first grade and hates it (except for recess) although he’s doing well. He’s okay if everything goes as expected but doesn’t handle change well. Most days he’s just a substitute bus driver away from hysteria. The day I had to put him on the bus with a six-hook fishing lure stuck in his pocket I thought I’d have to call a therapist. Dylan is 4-1/2, a true Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle addict and Brady’s best friend when they’re not trying to kill each other. He’s still a very funny guy, the spit-out vitamin pile aside.

Tom had his annual foot surgery, twice this year, I think, still works at the Post Office and still plans to become a chocolate mogul. Right now a crazy man thinks Tom’s having an affair with his 50-year-old girlfriend. (A sane man would know if Tom were having an affair, it would be with a 22-year-old bimbo.)

So that’s 1990 in a nutshell. We’re living, as always, on the edge of chaos but are healthy and borderline lucid. We wish you the same in the coming year and hope you don’t take this as permission to send us one of these tacky letters next year.

Merry Christmas,