Holiday Heat: Heartwarming and Bottomwarming Stories for the Festive Season

by April Hill

  “And now,” Josh said grimly, after he’d achieved the desired effect on my rear end. “You’re going to get your butt over there, apologize, and tell her we’ll pay for the damage. And you’re going to do it graciously, and with a smile on your face.”

  “Not on your life, buster!”

  The problem was, he still had the spoon in his hand. Which made it no problem at all to add a second round of swats to my already rosy-red behind. Two spankings for one crime, either one of which would have been more than sufficient, in my humble opinion.

  But, here’s the kicker, folks. I didn’t do it. I was innocent. Unjustly punished for a crime I didn’t commit.

  My kid had done it. Not so much out of loyalty, mind you, or as part of a conspiracy, but because he’d unearthed his old bow and arrow set in the garage. When the truth emerged, directly from young Robin Hood’s mouth, Josh did apologize to me for the unwarranted paddlings. Robin Hood did not get flogged, since his father and I had decided years ago that corporal punishment was not consistent with good parenting—a decision we have often had reason to regret. What he did get, though, was an unusually tough lecture, after which he was forced to trudge next door and apologize to the evil witch herself. He was also ordered to pay for the damage to the wounded president, and grounded to the environs of Sherwood Forest for a month. Personally, rather than apologize to Doris, I would have taken the thrashing. In a thrice.

  “I’m sorry I jumped the gun like that,” Josh said later, after he’d discovered his error.

  I put on my noble face. “It doesn’t matter,” I said with a heartfelt sigh.

  Josh shook his head. “Of course, it matters. I was wrong. I should have believed you when you said you had nothing to do with it.”

  I giggled. “Well, not exactly nothing. Actually, I spent an hour throwing gravel at Thomas Jefferson yesterday, hoping for results.”

  Before I had time to rethink or retract my unbelievably dumb admission, Josh had flipped me over on my stomach, yanked down my pajama bottoms, and launched into Presidential Paddling Number Two. Even bare handed, it turned out to be more disagreeable than its predecessor, since this one included penalty swats for lying. Spanked twice in one day, and for the same offense. A record, even for me.

  * * * *

  With time running out and Josh at an out-of-town police convention for the three days before Halloween, I was forced to draft Eric to help me upgrade our spider display, but when I showed him the proposed changes, he balked.

  “That’s not gonna work, Mom,” he complained. “It’s too freakin’ big. And heavy. If Dad was here…”

  “If Dad were here,” I corrected. “And he’s not, so get with the program. We don’t have much time. You want the witch to win?”

  Eric shrugged. “It’s just Halloween, Mom, not thermonuclear war.”

  “Traitor,” I growled. “My calculations show that all we need to do to make the first web bigger is to tie a couple of long ropes to the roof, and–”

  “Your calculations!” he hooted. “Geez, Mom, we both know you failed math four times. You told me you’d still be in high school if you hadn’t cheated on your stupid algebra final.”

  (That’s what comes of trying to bond with your teenager. It all comes back to haunt you when you least need it.)

  “Never mind that, now,” I continued. “All you have to do if hold the ladder while I…”

  “Dad’ll have a freakin’ cow if he knows you’ve been climbing around on the roof,” he pointed out, with some accuracy. Josh would not only have a freakin’ cow, he would probably nail my freakin’ hide to the freakin’ barn door—as our pioneer forefathers liked to say.

  Eric finally agreed to help (after a bit of blackmail and what bribery I could afford in my strained financial condition.) First, we had to secure the necessary extra ropes for the giant spider web to the big oak tree in the front yard, and from there to the corners of the roof. He bitched the whole time, predicting disaster. My beloved firstborn, with whom I labored in agony for sixteen hours, seemed primarily concerned that he might get the blame if I slipped, rolled off the roof, and broke both legs and arms. He needn’t have worried, though, because after two hours of trying to get up the courage to crawl onto the roof from the bedroom window, I finally had to settle for tying the ropes to the bedroom shutters.

  Eric leaned out the window and checked out my inexpert knots. “Well, it’s for sure you’d have flunked out of Girl Scout training,” he remarked rudely. “Those are the dumbest looking knots I’ve ever seen. And besides, the shutters aren’t strong enough.”

  “Yes, they are,” I answered, with a confidence I didn’t actually feel. I reached out and snapped the rope. “And those knots are tight as a drum.”

  At that point, the right hand shutter tore loose, bounced onto the porch roof, and clattered down onto the driveway. When I looked down, the shutter was in more pieces than I could count.

  “Awesome,” Eric breathed. “It could have been you, though.”

  “Go down and pick up all the broken crap,” I ordered. “And see what it looks like from the yard. Maybe your father won’t notice. They say people never look up.”

  Eric rolled his eyes. “Yeah, sure, Mom. Anything you say.”

  While he was gone, I pulled my Spiderwoman costume out of the drawer and tried it on. Sewing isn’t exactly my thing, so it hadn’t turned out as well as I’d hoped. When Eric came back upstairs, I was lying on the bed, dressed as Spiderwoman, and planning what I would say to Josh. I had developed a splitting headache, and the costume itched.

  “How bad is it?” I inquired miserably. “I’m thinking maybe I should take off before your father gets home. Maybe to Bolivia?”

  He shook his head. “Bolivia’s not gonna be far enough. Maybe someplace in Africa. You know, where they don’t have extradition?” He pointed to my homemade costume. “What’s that?”

  “Spiderwoman,” I said. “What else?”

  He shrugged. “I thought you were a tick, or like that. Don’t spiders have eight legs? Did you flunk biology, too?”

  I turned my head into the pillow, and groaned

  The only good thing to be said about the rest of that day was that Josh wouldn’t be home until late, so I had enough time to finish my preparations without getting yelled at while I was doing it. The giant web I’d improvised out of spray-painted rope and fourteen bags of artificial spider webbing at eight bucks a pop was holding pretty well, having now been anchored to the foot of the bed. My masterpiece, a gigantic spider I thought of as Max, had been hastily constructed with black plastic garbage bags stuffed with newspapers, with glued-together shipping tubes for legs.

  The problem, of course, was attaching Max to the giant spider web, and yes, I know I should have done that before we strung up the web. So, sue me.

  After several attempts at throwing Max onto his web, pushing him onto it with a broom, and blowing him out there with the shop vac, I reached the unpleasant conclusion that I was going to have to crawl out onto the web myself, and drag him behind me.

  I know, but I was desperate. Josh was already going to blow his top when he saw the wreckage on the front of the house. If I could just get freaking Max where he was supposed to be, maybe Josh would at least appreciate the artistic effort I’d put into the whole Halloween debacle.

  And so, with trembling knees, and still in my Spiderwoman costume because the zipper was stuck, I climbed out the bedroom window, perched for a terrified moment on the ledge, and very, very carefully, edged out onto the taut tangle of painted rope I was hoping resembled a spider web. Behind me, looking less and less like an arachnid as two of his cardboard legs came off, was Max the homemade spider.

  To my relief, the ropes on both sides of the house held firmly—for about seven or eight seconds. Seconds in which I was able to crawl maybe ten feet, with the disintegrating Max in tow.

  I screamed, naturally, and immediately sacrificed poor Max, who slipped slowly though the widening gaps in
the rope web and fell to his death on the driveway below. I screamed again, and looked down to see Eric staring up at me, more confused than anything else.

  “Mom?” he asked stupidly. (I guess my costume was better than I thought.) When I gestured wildly to the bedroom window, he took off running, Seconds later, he burst into the room and poked his head out the window.

  “Holy shit!” Okay, he shouldn’t have used that specific word, but since I was muttering it to myself like an endless mantra, I could hardly complain.

  “Do something!” I screeched, hanging on for dear life to the nearest section of web.

  “I can’t reach you,” he shouted back. “I need to call Dad, or maybe the rescue squad or something.”

  “Don’t you dare,” I screeched. “Just don’t panic! We can handle this!”

  “C’mon, Mom,” he whined, reaching for the phone. “Get real. You’re gonna fall any minute, now. Just hang on and don’t move! Dad’ll know what to do.”

  “Touch that phone and you’ll regret it, buster!” I shrieked. “You’ll never see another dime’s allowance from me.”

  “I always get my allowance from Dad,” he responded. “When you do it, you usually borrow it back a couple of days later. And remember the time you paid me back with a check, and when I took it to the bank, they said…”

  (Okay, so I sometimes experience minor cash-flow problems around the end of each month.) When Josh found out about the NSF check I’d given our own child, you can probably guess what happened. The check was for twenty bucks, and the bounce fee was twenty-five. The bank got its crappy fee, the kid got his twenty bucks back, and I got forty-five whacks on the bare behind with a ping-pong paddle. Everyone handles their family finances differently, right?

  Moments later, Josh swung into the driveway with siren blaring and flashing red and blue lights, which— naturally enough— drew the rapt attention of everyone in the neighborhood. Doris was on her front lawn almost immediately, and I’m pretty sure she was smiling.

  “I’m going to get spanked for this, right?” I asked wearily. Josh had crawled out the window, now, and was positioning an aluminum ladder on the porch roof, just underneath the swaying web, and my squirming behind.

  “Bet on it,” Josh growled. By now, he had both hands around my waist, pulling me free of the web. A moment later, I was on the ladder, and safely in his arms.

  “But, the whole thing was just a stupid accident,” I reminded him.

  Josh took my arm and helped me back up the porch roof, to the bedroom window, lifted me bodily through the window, and set me down on the floor. “Weaving a damned forty-foot spider web on the front of your house and crawling around on it isn’t an accident,” he said grimly. “It’s one hundred percent premeditated stupidity.”

  “Why do you always have to look at everything in the worst possible light?” I inquired irritably.

  “I can’t imagine. Maybe experience?”

  “Can I explain?”

  “I wouldn’t miss that for the world. You can start explaining right after I set your idiot ass on fire.”

  “So, you get to be the both the judge and jury, is that it?”

  Josh nodded. “Yep. And let’s not forget executioner.”

  The sentence was pretty much pre-ordained, of course, and executed moments after he pulled me back through the bedroom window. Once he had checked me out for damage, (there was none) he dumped me over a big pile of pillows, took a couple of seconds to locate my big wooden hairbrush, then shoved the ripped black tights of the tick outfit down around my knees. When the first blows cracked across my chilled cheeks, I began yowling at the top of my lungs and tried to crawl off the bed, got tangled in the bedspread, and tore off three of my stumpy little tick legs. Josh tossed the legs aside, pulled my tights all the way down to my ankles, and stuck another pillow under me. Then, apparently rethinking the situation, he rolled up his shirt-sleeves, took off his belt, and started over from the beginning, with a more serious implement.

  * * * *

  On a scale of one to ten, I’d call this one a fourteen. Not only was Josh in a really grumpy mood, I had scared him, and scaring Josh always earns me a bit of extra, unwanted attention. In the course of our seventeen years of marriage, Josh has somehow gotten it in his head that I tend to be careless about my own safety and well-being, and when he thinks I’ve put myself in danger, he can be a real bear about it.

  It may not surprise you to hear that while I was lying over that pile of pillows with my rear end on fire, kicking and swearing and howling my head off, I didn’t think even once of where my children were.

  Seconds after the last belt swat landed, though, I sat bolt upright, and threw my hands to my face, horrified.

  Josh read my mind. “They’re not here,” he said, tossing his belt down on the bed. “I gave Eric your car keys and thirty bucks. He’s taking Jenny to the mall, to see the new Shrek.”

  “She’s seen it,” I sniffled. “And Eric hates Shrek.”

  “I think it was being allowed to take the car that cinched the deal. Besides, no kid wants to hang around while his parents fight, and I suspect they knew we were about to have words.”

  I rubbed my rear end. “Words? “ I inquired testily. “I don’t recall saying a lot.”

  Josh chuckled. “You want to say something, now?”

  “Just that I’m really, truly sorry,” I moaned. “About everything. But I’ll bet old Doris loved every minute of it.” I glanced at the window, and saw with relief that Josh had closed it after we came inside.

  “None of this was Doris’s fault,” he reminded me. “If you’re still thinking that, I may need to start all over. Maybe with the window open, this time.” He sat down next to me on the bed. “Then, again, if you’ll take off that tick costume, we can just lie down for a while and talk it all over, until the kids…”

  “This is not a damned tick costume,” I said smugly. “I’m Spiderwoman.”

  He nodded. “One of my favorites. Except for the venom blast, of course. That can really put a damper on a guy’s sex life.”

  “You know about Spiderwoman?” I asked, amazed.

  “No, but our son does. According to him, she’s five foot ten, weighs 130 pounds, and exudes radioactive bioelectricity.”

  “A lot like me, then?” I suggested sweetly. “Radiantly lovely, bad temper, a little too thin?”

  Josh smiled. “Exactly. Now, let’s get you out of that outfit.” He glanced at his watch. “We’ve got about an hour before the offspring show up. I’m guessing you’ll want to be on top, considering. Right?”

  THE END

  “Tradition”

  “The boar’s head in hand bring I,

  With garlands gay and rosemary.”

  —Traditional Yuletide Carol

  Christmas and Thanksgiving are all about tradition, of course, but some traditions are about as enjoyable as the one above—being a served a severed boar’s head with an apple crammed in its mouth. (Think of “Babe” the charming movie piglet, being served at your holiday dinner—beheaded, disemboweled, and barbecued.)

  In our family—more specifically in my marriage—the tradition, though not actually written down anywhere, seems to be that at some time during the season of peace and brotherhood, I will get at least one phenomenal, world class spanking. My husband Hank, who has just read this sentence over my shoulder, suggests that this would be more accurate if I changed the word “get” to “earn.”

  Whether I get it or earn it doesn’t really matter. From my point of view, which is admittedly slanted, being spanked just isn’t an especially festive tradition, certainly not to be compared with being kissed under the mistletoe or finding a diamond bracelet in one’s stocking. Still, the tradition does have historical foundation. Remember how bad little Victorian children were said to find switches and lumps of coal in their stockings instead of candy canes and sugar plums?

  I don’t even get the lump of coal.

  It wasn’t actually a tra
dition, back then, but the very first time Hank ever spanked me was at Christmas. Now, is that nostalgic and romantic, or what?

  That was fifteen years ago, and we weren’t married yet, or blessed yet with children. (That part was romantic.) Anyway, it three days before Christmas, and Hank and I had just rented and watched—while snuggled romantically together on his couch—a beautiful older Swedish movie called “Fanny and Alexander.” This is a lovely movie, by the way, and one I recommend to anyone who wants to know what Christmas should look like, and maybe even did, a hundred years ago. I do not, however, recommend emulating the lovely Scandinavian tradition of putting real, lit candles on the Christmas tree. Not unless you first pre-notify the fire department, check your insurance to see if acts of gross stupidity are covered, and make very certain that every item capable of being used as a spanking tool is carefully hidden away.

  I loved the fairy tale glow of the candles on the trees in “Fanny and Alexander,” you see, and when the movie was over, I began to wonder if using real candles on a tree was truly feasible. At first, Hank laughed, assuming—as any reasonably intelligent person would—that I wasn’t serious about actually trying such a lame-brained idea. But Hank didn’t know me very well, yet. (I have this problem with scientific curiosity.) Of course, even I wasn’t stupid enough to try such a thing inside the house, but there was this line of pine trees around the house, you see…

  Yep. You guessed it. What happened next involved two fire trucks, three police cars, headlines in the local newspaper, and a spanking I will still be remembering in superb detail when I’m a hundred years old. Who would have thought that three wet, snow-covered trees could have gone up so quickly—like a trio of Roman candles? One flash of light, a sudden whoosh of air, and instant, blazing inferno.

  Even then, with the trees burned to frail black skeletons, the side of the house badly scorched, and the police asking Hank in hushed tones if there was “something wrong” with me, I don’t think Hank would have lost it the way he did if I hadn’t stepped in and added my two cents to the chaos. You see, the proper thing to do when you have just set someone’s house on fire is to apologize profusely, offer to pay for the damage, and promise to go on Prozac the very next day. Unfortunately, I didn’t do any of those things.