Christmas Connection

Here's my updated entry for the Winter Holidays Contest 2024. Its not substantially changed, so if you read it originally, it'll be basically the same upon rereading. I've fixed a few small things thay were bothering me.

It's a little like my other stories, in that it's a romance, and I've tried to have some of it be somewhat realistic. In other ways, though...

A couple of notes for the reader. All of this is fictional. It's all in here because I thought it would fit the story. If you read it and think "That's not how bakery goods are distributed regionally," then I apologize in advance for getting it wrong. I didn't do a lot of background research. My muses told me what to write, and I wrote.

Also, I try to write normal, flawed people. If you like your stories filled with 12" cocks and breasts that require the Army Corps of Engineers to keep the women from toppling over, then yay! But you won't read about them here.

Also, also. All the sex described in the story takes place between two adult women and one adult man. However, there are other people in the world. If you're the sort of person who will have your arousal vanish because there's a mention of a gay man somewhere in the next 46,000 words, be warned.

Because there's three members of this romantic trio, I originally put this in Group Sex, but it's really a Romance, so I decided to move it, and it could go in mature, or a couple of other things.

Now that that's out of the way, let's take a trip to a little town that has a very special Inn, and in that Inn is a verrrrry special room that this year will welcome three visitors.

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Introduction

Leaky Dick, CO (1990 census population 11,833) had been founded in 1872 as the result of the confluence of the Munroe brothers' inadequate water-retention-structure-building skills and the inconsistent and limited educational practices of the time. Locals had complained about the "leaky dike" that Randall and Roger had used to stop up a creek coming off the Colorado River for years, and the name stuck, years after the Munroe brothers were long gone. But at the time, spelling wasn't as consistent as it is today, what with the absence of spell check on pencils, and it got written down... wrong. By the time "Dick" had taken on the slang meaning it has today, it was too established.

As time went on, the town embraced the absurdity of its name the best it could, with enterprising locals selling t-shirts and hats and bumper stickers that encouraged travelers far and wide to take a detour from the big roads with the red, white, and blue shields and I-Somenumber or another written on them, and it worked...to a point. A lot of the people they got were visitors from one of the state universities who thought that the name was the height of humor. Enough "Welcome to Leaky Dick" road signs had been stolen that the town printed a whole bunch that they kept in storage at the Public Works building. Rush weeks in Boulder and Fort Collins were particularly bad, and finally some city leader added a second sign. "If you would like a road sign of your very own, they are available for purchase." That didn't stop the vandalism entirely, but it helped, and it did bring in some money.

This state of being might have continued until the explosion of the Yellowstone Caldera if not for one Thomas Robinson. Tommy was a freshman at CU Boulder in the fall of 1998, and Tommy really, really, really wanted to join Sigma Sigma Sigma. He thought they were just the bees knees (to use slang that Tommy had never heard) and hoped fervently that if he joined, he could finally take one of the comely co-eds on campus to the malt shop.

Or something. Tommy's brain was a fevered mess of hormones, Keystone Light, and, a present from his roommate Mike, some of the worst weed this side of Paducah. Not that he knew any better. Tommy and Mike hopped in Mike's silver and rust-colored 1983 Mustang (290,332 miles, and you could only see pavement through the floor if he wasn't driving too fast - otherwise it was a blur) and headed for Leaky Dick, determined to pull some act that would get the powers that be in Sigma Sigma Sigma to admit them. Thankfully for everyone concerned, they managed to get there without killing anyone, but it was a close thing more than once - something that both Tommy and Mike would come to regret once they found themselves up in front of a judge.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

When they got to Leaky Dick, our two intrepid fraternity hopefuls decided not to just steal a road sign (had they done that, this story might never have happened). They decided that they'd pee on it first (get it - Leaky Dick...), then steal the entire monument the sign was mounted on (including the "if you'd like a sign of your own" sign and the "Congratulations to Melissa Thorne, 1985 Class AA Girls Long Jump State Champion" sign). They grabbed some garden hoses from nearby homes, made a loop with them that went through the windows of Mike's soon-to-be-defunct Mustang. Then they wrapped the loop around the monument and gunned the engine.

The car didn't go anywhere, since the engineers who'd designed the monument were better at their jobs than the Munroe brothers. So Tommy got the idea to get some more hoses and make a bigger loop so the car could get a running start.

What neither of the young men noticed was that they had not gone unnoticed. Had they just taken the sign, Willa Carruthers would have just called Pete at Public Works and he would have installed a new one. But Tommy and Mike's...innovative...approach caught her attention. And that of her neighbors, one of whom had just gotten a new camcorder to film her exploits with her husband. She threw in a new tape and got almost the whole thing, including when Tommy yelled "punch it!" and Mike cackled and punched it good.

That Mustang had been on its last legs for a long time by that point, but it saved its best for last and took off like a bat out of hell. And when the garden hose went taut, instead of tearing the monument from its foundations, it tore the top of the Mustang off like it was a convertible, though it had not been prior to that moment. Tommy and Mike escaped death because of the luck of the young and the drunk as they were thrown from the car, barely missing all manner of sharp things and flying through the air until they landed in a flowerbed.

Standing next to the flowerbed was Leaky Dick's Chief of Police, Andy Rypien. Once he stopped laughing at the groaning boys, he radioed for an ambulance and a tow truck.

After being checked out at the county hospital, Tommy and Mike made their way to the Leaky Dick police headquarters where they were treated properly (although with plenty of snickers), because this is not the kind of story where we get into the details of the justice system. Mike...well, we don't care about Mike anymore. He had to drop out of college, got hooked on meth, and now lives under an assumed name in the jungles of Nicaragua. So he's fine.

Tommy, on the other hand, called his mommy. Tommy's mommy was Not Happy With Her Son, but she got on a plane and traveled to the soon-to-be-renamed Leaky Dick to bail him out and put the fear of God, Satan, Zeus, N'yarthotep, and whoever else she could think of into him. It worked. He graduated - eventually, and got a nice job and married a nice woman and they have 2.5 nice kids and dogs and whatever. It's all good for him, is the point. He tries not to think about Gustavo - formerly known as Mike - and gigantic snakes in the jungle very often, and he mostly succeeds. We can also leave Tommy here.

When Holly Robinson arrived in Leaky Dick, ready to bail out her son, the lives of everyone in the town changed.

Holly worked for Hallmark. She didn't make greeting cards. She made movies. Not by herself, but she was an important producer for the arm of the company that made those movies that draw so many viewers at the end of each year. The wish-fulfillment romance novels brought to the small screen where two people from wildly different walks of life meet, hate each other, secretly like each other, go through challenges, and fall in love, all because of the spirit of Christmas. They make people happy, and if you gripe that they're not realistic, well, think about where you're reading this story.

Because of her job, Holly saw the world through a lens of "could this be used for a movie?" An old bookstore. A lumber mill. A Christmas tree farm (some of these questions weren't difficult). You might pass her on the street and suddenly find yourself wearing a winter coat in July listening to an actress you totally would recognize even if you didn't know her name talking about how frustrating that man who just moved to town and thinks he knows better than she, the woman who has run the calligraphy shop ever since she inherited it from her grandmother, ever could, about how to address wedding invitations. And when Holly arrived in Leaky Dick, this is what she saw:

Nestled among the pines along the curves of a mountain that whoever created the Earth would have won an award for, if such a thing were given out, was a downtown filled to the brim with coffee shops and knick-knack shops and candle shops and wine bars and Martin's Hardware Store and Corrine's Used Book Shoppe and the Leaky Dick Diner, which, despite its name, made the best stews and pies and burgers you could ask for. Main Street ran parallel to the creek that the Munroe brothers failed to dam up, and it had widened itself to darned near a river. Along the darned near a river were benches and a walking path and places to build a fire and enjoy a brisk fall or winter evening, if there wasn't too much snow. There was a new K-8 school and a new high school (the students, cheeky scamps all, had voted for 'Trojans' to be the mascot, but they were overruled by the school board, and everyone in town rooted for the Leaky Dick Mighty Ducks). There was a town square with a gazebo and a band shell and the Mountainside Inn (they refused to use the word "Leaky" for fear of conjuring up images of damp rooms and drafty winter nights) had 45 rooms and suites with fireplaces and whirlpools. About the only chains you could find were McDonald's, because this was America, after all, a couple of gas stations, and a Days Inn out by the main road into town. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, the setting for about 45% of the movies Holly helped make. But because it was named Leaky Motherfucking Dick, nobody knew about it. Well, except for Mike and Tommy (and we've already forgotten about them).

And now Holly.

Holly got herself a room at the Mountainside Inn (she let Tommy spend one final night in the hoosegow) and looked out over the moon-drenched valley for hours, wrapped in a soft robe after taking a long bath, drinking a lovely little Riesling, and then she got out her laptop. By the morning, she'd put together a business plan (absent some details she'd have to get from her assistant in those pre-internet everywhere days) on how she could change the fortunes of everyone in Leaky Dick, Colorado and simultaneously make her life vastly easier.

Plus, of course, make Hallmark truckloads of money. Follow the money, sheeple.

She called the mayor, and he called the Town Council, and later the next day, with Tommy sitting appropriately chagrined and silent as a churchmouse in the back of the council chambers, Holly laid out her plan.

Leaky Dick would become the new home of Hallmark's holiday movies. Not all of them, of course. Some of them involved a country mouse moving to the city, but if there was a mountain town, Leaky Dick would be it. And not just Christmas movies, either. Valentine's Day. Independence Day. Father's Day. Mother's Day. Nude Day. (Had to throw that in there - Hallmark didn't make those kinds of movies. Yet.) They could hold festivals. Cooking competitions. Bring in special guests. And the best part was that about the only things they'd need to change were adding a couple more hotels outside of town and, well, the name of the town.

The Town Council screamed bloody murder. Then Holly showed them her projections for how many tourism dollars would flow into town. And the Town Council screamed Hallelujah.

Ladies, Gentlemen, and those who prefer neither, welcome to Holiday Junction, Colorado.

Some people complained. The hardcore Leaky Dickers persist to this day, but for the purposes of this story, we'll ignore them. Most of them started getting high a lot when Colorado legalized marijuana and stopped becoming a nuisance, anyway.

Things progressed in Holiday Junction, and on December 1-3, 2000, the town hosted its 1st Annual Holiday Junction Christmas Connection (nobody listened to the grammar scolds who said that you couldn't call something an "annual" the first time it happened). They drew small business vendors from around the state who made Christmas-themed products. Hand towels with reindeer faces. Cookies. Scented soaps. Dishware. Ornaments. You get the idea. In addition to the vendors came the shoppers - both the individual kind who wanted to decorate their house just so and the store kind who were looking for the next hit item for the 2001 holiday season. It was a huge hit. By 2001 there were two new hotels, joining the Days Inn and the Hampton Inn, plus a handful of Bed & Breakfasts. The most desirable rooms were at the Mountainside Inn, of course, but there were only 45 of those. And outside of two people, nobody noticed what had happened in Room 37.

The country was in a funk in 2001, but the 2nd Annual Holiday Junction Christmas Connection was a bright point for everyone who attended. It was a particularly bright point for the two people who'd stayed in Room 37 of the Mountainside Inn, though nobody noticed except them and their neighbor in Room 38.

The Holiday Junction Christmas Connection grew every year, except of course in 2020, when it was virtual, and it was somewhat scaled back in 2021, though filled with joy and Christmas-themed doodads and whatnots. And special joy for the two people in Room 37 of the Mountainside Inn. In fact, had anyone been paying attention, they would have discovered that there were two people in Room 37 of the Mountainside Inn the first weekend in December of 2020 despite the Inn only having 7 guests total.

And the two people hadn't known each other before checking in.

That was the secret of Room 37 of the Mountainside Inn. It was a secret that some of the Inn's long-time staff suspected, but nobody outright knew. For twenty-four years, during the Holiday Junction Christmas Connection, two people would get keys to Room 37, a lovely, romantic room with a king-sized bed, a fireplace, a whirlpool, and a westward view over the river so that the setting sun or full moon sparkled along its twisty length when looked at during just the right moment. Those two people would never have met before. They never would have heard of each other before, making Christmas-themed foods or household goods that had no connection to one another. There would be some utterly contrived reason why they would have to share the room, a reason that they each bought into with ease because the other person made them feel things in their heads and their hearts and their groins that made them want to spend time together.

Room 37 had never paired two people up who weren't a good match. They didn't all get married, because not all people believe in marriage, or because fate is fickle and accidents happen, but even where the romantic spark did not last through the years, in each and every case where both guests remained alive, they remained good friends at the very least. Of the twenty-four pairings, there had been seventeen marriages, thirty children, and as of this writing, two grandchildren. Eighteen of the couples had been a pairing of a man and a woman, and the other six had been mixtures of other genders. Room 37 was a very progressive room, twice giving people an opportunity to discover that a person they could truly love wasn't someone they would have given a chance to had the room not intervened. It did not, however, break up relationships. If you traveled to Holiday Junction as part of a couple, a triad, a polycule, or whatever, no matter how fractious or tenuous, you would not find a key to Room 37 in your hand unless you made the call to your partner(s) before check-in. Room 37 knew it had a power to change lives, and it didn't use that power carelessly.

The town of Holiday Junction, CO, had put a lot of planning into the 25th Annual Christmas Connection, and everyone involved was expecting an extravaganza of the highest proportions. For a whole week this year, from December 1st through the 8th, the town would swell from its normal 17,552 residents (as of the 2020 census) to nearly 36,000. And the three luckiest would spend the week in Room 37 of the Mountainside Inn.

Yes, I said three.

November 30

1.

Kristy Haglund grabbed the last of the boxes from the kitchen and made her way out to the area behind the bakery she generously called the "loading dock." She would have preferred to have the "Kristy's Kringles" delivery truck for this trip, but like everything else that had happened in 2024, that truck had decided to fuck her over. Just like her ex-husband, who in January had decided that he just 'didn't want to be married anymore.' He didn't have anyone else, he was just done. Or just like her parents, who in February had gotten sick with what they had thought was a cold but turned out to be the flu and then that turned out to be pneumonia and because neither one of them trusted anyone who didn't advertise on their favorite TV station, they didn't see a doctor until it was too late, and by March she was an orphan. And then in March she found out that they hadn't kept up the payments on their life insurance and not only had she lost them, but somehow it was going to cost her money to sell their house. In April she broke her leg. May wasn't too bad, except for the bee sting between her breasts that made her feel like she had the least-attractive third nipple ever (could you have an attractive third nipple?). In June a pipe had burst at the bakery. In July she'd tried dating again, only to be stood up - twice - so that experiment got shut down in a hurry. In July the AC went out and while she had seven gazillion orders, which was good because she'd been in desperate need of money, the bakery was a hellish place to be for about ten days straight. In August, her best friend moved to North Carolina. September saw her first root canal. She'd almost made it all the way through October, but then on Halloween lost her wallet and had to replace every piece of identification. And then on November 20, right as she was planning the big drive to Holiday Junction, her delivery van got sideswiped into a tree and she was forced to cram everything into her sister's Kia Sedona. A perfectly cromulent minivan for a family with three young kids and a dog, but not ideal for a businesswoman with product to sell.

But needs must, as they say, and Kristy thanked her sister more times than her sister needed. "Go sell some Kringles!" Amanda had said. "And maybe land one of those hunky accountants in to foreclose on the Christmas Tree Farm who really has a heart of gold and abs of steel!" Kristy and Amanda had watched their share of the movies that had gotten made in Holiday Junction, and they loved to joke about them. Kristy didn't want a man with abs of steel, though. Her ex had been like that. The heart of gold, on the other hand...

The van was crammed from stem to stern, but thankfully it wasn't a long drive, and while they were expecting snow, she knew she'd beat it. She'd grown up in the area, after all. And at the other end of the drive, she'd been lucky enough to snag one of the limited rooms in the famous Mountainside Inn. Some people wanted the bigger, more modern spaces in the hotels outside of town, or even in the warehouse that had been turned into a Marriott, but Kristy was a sucker for the classic, romantic charm of places like the Mountainside. Her ex never would have stayed there. "Why do I want to pay extra for a room I won't spend any time in, and besides, the TVs there are too small." She'd seen the pictures on the website, though, and thought of having a glass of red wine at the bar in the attached restaurant, talking to the other vendors, watching the snow fall and trying to forget the nightmare than had been 2024, and smiled despite it all.