Spanky Claus is Coming to Town

Oh, you’d better watch out, get ready to cry
Get your pants down, I’m telling you why.
Spanky Claus is coming to town.

He sees you when you’re naughty, knows you’re a bad boy
He’s going to spank your bottom, ‘fore you get your Christmas toy

You know you deserve a trip o’er his lap
His sleighs full of paddles, switches and straps
Spanky Claus is coming--
Your bottom he’ll be drumming--
Spanky Claus is coming to town.



First of all, let me assure you that I’m not, nor have I ever been, a Grinch or Scrooge. I love holidays. What I tend to hate (or at least resent with a dull throb of boredom) is the long vacations around them. Why would any kid hate school holidays? Let me see.

"Hi, Mrs. Howell. Is Jimmy home?"

"No honey. He’s gone to his cousins. We’re all going to meet at his grandparents for Christmas, and he’ll be back the day after."

"Hi, Jana. Is Butch home?"

"Hi, Jackie. No, I’m afraid he’s gone to his dad’s house. He’ll be back Christmas afternoon, but we’re going to visit family, and we should be home on New Years Eve."

"Hi, Mrs. DeLaPaz. Is Rudy home?"

"Sorry, but he’s at his grandma’s until Christmas Eve. Would you like a cookie? I just baked them."

At least I got something from Rudy’s mom.

Even my little brother’s gone. Since we’re really half-brothers, we spend part of Christmas together with our dad, but for now, he’s visiting his mom’s family. The only good thing is, my evil half-sister is gone to her dad’s house. Everyone else whose parents are divorced has a dad that lives someplace cool and they get to go visit and see other friends. My dad lives a twelve minute ride away on my bike.

So with four days to go until Christmas, I’m bored out of my mind. I’m eleven. It’s a beautiful day outside…. Well, actually it’s gray, overcast, and a little chilly, but I’m dying for something to do. The really bad part is, with school out and Christmas a few days away, I’m not even going to be able to beg a little change to buy comics.

Finally, out of desperation more than anything else, I decide to go check the construction sites. They’re not working this week, but I usually don’t pick up all the bottles because I just don’t have room for them. It’s not like it is over the summer when they’re all swigging soda like water, but maybe I missed some. If nothing else, it’ll get me out of the house for a while.



The bike ride to the construction area isn’t long, even though I’m not trying to go fast. I stick the old basket between my handlebars and grab my knap sack, just in case I get lucky. Once there, I lock my bike behind a pile of lumber where no one should see it in the first place, then go about exploring. I find a few bottles but come across something much more interesting about half way through the development.

He must be about seven, or maybe eight, but definitely smaller than Matt. It’s not really cold; I’m just wearing an old flannel shirt over a tee, but he’s got a fairly heavy jacket on. At first, I can’t see his face, but he seems to be upset. He’s sitting at the side of the house, where the wall hasn’t been built yet, on the edge of the slab, and rocking back and forth. For a minute, it seems like he’s talking to himself, but as I get closer, I realize he’s singing.

"He sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows if you’re awake. He knows if…." And I’d swear the kid sobbed.

"Are you okay?" I asked.

The little guy jumped like I’d just stepped on his tail, coming off the concrete and turning. His eyes were wide. I guess he wasn’t paying much attention, or I was quieter than I thought.

"Hi," I said quietly, waving at him.

Slowly his hand came up and he waved back. "Hi."

"Are you okay?" I asked again. He just looked at me and shrugged.

"My name’s Jack," I volunteered. It was obvious the kid wasn’t okay. His eyes were red enough that he had to have been crying at least a little.

"I’m Andrew," he replied after a minute.

Andrew was really a pretty good looking kid, except that he had these huge teeth, and his hair, which was a lot shorter than most of us wore it back then, wasn’t blond—it was white. His eyebrows were so light it almost looked like he didn’t have any.

"Are you cold?"

He shrugged again. "A little."

I looked around conspiratorially. "You wanna make a fire?"

"I’m not supposed to."

"Well, you wanna watch me make one then?"

He nodded, hesitant but intrigued as well.

He followed me into a house a couple back that was a bit further towards completion and moved into what was probably going to be the dining room—a room without exterior exposure. There was some stuff piled up, but it was pretty dirty, so I ran out and came back with some toilet paper and paper towels from one of the Port-A-Potties. Using the paper towels, I cleaned off an area in the center of the floor, then put some more down on the tiles for us to sit on. With that done, I ran back to a scrap lumber pile and found some little stuff that’d make good kindling and a few bigger pieces.

Andrew watched in fascination as I got it started. Lighters were easy enough to find lying around there, and I used the toilet paper to start it. It wasn’t long before we had a little blaze going. I opened my overshirt and Andrew slipped out of his jacket. With his jacket off, I could see the thermal top clinging to his lean frame. We settled down and warmed our hands for a minute, then we talked for a while, before he finally found the nerve to admit what had been bothering him.

"You know ‘Santa Claus is Coming to Town’?"

I assumed he meant the song, and not Christmas Eve. "Sure," I told him. "I bet everyone does."

"Is it true?" he asked, and his voice was so nervous, I figured some jerk older kid must have told him there was no Santa Claus.

Now, don’t get me wrong; I was eleven-years old. I knew that Santa was more a spirit of the holidays than an old guy in the red suit, but I woulda busted anybody that tried to tell Matt he wasn’t real. I couldn’t do that in this case, but I could try to help. I scooted over a bit closer to him, dropped my arm around his shoulders, and tried to reassure him. "Of course it is."

And he burst into tears.

If you’re wondering, that is not the reaction I expected.

"Hey, what’s the matter?" I said, not understanding his reaction at all and starting to get a little irate.

"I’m not gonna get nuthin’ for Christmas."

Geez, the kid was going through a whole list of Christmas carols here.

"Why not, Andrew?"

"’Cause I’m naughty."

Okay. Now this I could deal with. I’d had those same worries before, once I started getting old enough to understand what it really meant (and remember my behavior for more than the past week).

"It’s okay, Andrew. You’re still gonna get presents. Everybody’s naughty sometimes. Santa understands that. Besides," I added, touching on a subject near and dear to my heart—or other parts of my anatomy, "don’t you get spanked when you’re naughty?"

The kid looked up at me and nodded.

"Well, my dad always told me that once you had a spanking, you had a clean slate. Doesn’t your dad tell you that?"

He nodded again.

"Well, I know it’s true, ‘cause I’ve been naughty, but got spanked, then still got presents, so you’re gonna be okay."

"But what if," he stopped and took a big sniff. I reached over and got some toilet paper and helped him blow his nose, then he tried again. "What if you been naughty but you don’t get spanked. You’re still naughty then, aren’t you?"

I had to think about that for a minute. "I guess it depends on what you did. Did you get away with something?"

"A bunch of stuff," he admitted, almost in a wail, and tears started running down his face again. "I…" sniff, "I stole money from my mama and disobeyed her."

"That’s pretty bad," I admitted, dropping my arm and turning to face him. "Do you want to tell me about it?"

"She wouldn’t let me get ice cream from the truck, but then she went to the bathroom, so I got a quarter out of her purse and said I was goin’ to my friend’s house and went and got an ice cream instead."

Ice cream truck? "This was last summer?"

He nodded, tears still rolling down his cheeks. His skin wasn’t quite as fair as his hair, but his face was still flushed and blotchy from his crying. Poor little tyke. I had to wonder if he’d just remembered this because he was afraid Santa wouldn’t bring him anything, or if it had been bothering him all these months.

"If you felt really bad about it, why didn’t you ever tell someone?"

"I was gonna, but Grandma and Grandpa came over that day, and Mama told them that I’d been being a really good boy and she was very proud of me."

Yeah, I can see how that’d lock a guy up. You want to confess and get it over with, but when they say something like that, the idea of disappointing them is worse than a spanking could ever be.

"So you felt bad that you did it, but you didn’t want to let everybody down, and now it’s almost Christmas and you’re afraid they’re going to find out anyway because Santa’s not going to bring you anything?"

He nodded, glad that someone else understood the problem, even if it wasn’t one of the someones he needed to understand it. I put my arm back around him and he cuddled against my flannel-covered chest. I rocked with him for a minute, trying to find a way out of it. Obviously, his parents had never figured it out, so he was going to get presents from Santa, and I couldn’t help but wonder what he’d think of that. Would it make him feel forgiven, or even worse? What the poor little squirt needed to do was confess to someone and take his punishment so he could put it behind him.

And then it occurred to me that he had confessed to someone.

"Andrew, you need a spanking."

"I know," he whined from my chest, "but I don’t want to tell anyone."

"When your dad told you that you’re all forgiven after a spanking, did he ever say the spanking had to be from him?"

He pulled away from me, and I let him. He was looking up at me, confusion written across his face, so I explained.

"Well, if I spank you, wouldn’t that be good enough?"

His eyes went wide, startled at the idea and probably nervous. Slowly, he began to nod. His mouth opened, then he paused and licked his lips, and finally said, "You’d do that for me?"

Oh, in a minute, little buddy. "Sure. I’ve got little brothers, and I’d hate for them to be stuck like this. I’ll be glad to help you out. You know it’ll have to be a real spanking, though."

"Daddy says I gotta cry loud and hard so he knows I learned my lesson."

"How does your daddy spank you?"

"He pulls down my pants and undies and I gotta lay down on his lap."

"And you’re sure you want me to do that for you?"

He didn’t say anything, so I looked up to see him nodding, even while he was nervously chewing his lower lip. I tried to say something but couldn’t, so just pointed at the floor right in front of me. He stood up and stepped there, standing trustingly and expectantly.

My hands were trembling as I reached up to unsnap his jeans. I almost couldn’t get it. He reached down, and I saw his little hands were trembling as much as mine, but I guess the shakes cancelled each other out, because mine were suddenly steady after he laid his hands over mine. I undid the snap, drew the zipper down, then shoved his jeans partway down his thighs, exposing his little white briefs. I took his briefs and slid them down to his jeans, but was suddenly stricken with an urge to see everything, so I shoved them both down to his ankles, then grabbed his shirt and started to shove it up. His skin was so soft and smooth under my hands, and he took the shirt from me, lifting it all the way up to his underarms, and stood there, willingly exposing his boyish glory to me.

He was beautiful. I didn’t get many chances to see a naked boys. Mostly when I did it was because we were about to get spanked—a situation that’s not really conducive to enjoyment. Other times, even when doing something like strip poker, you don’t want the other guys to think you’re staring. The only boys I ever got a chance to really look at were my brother Matt and my cousin Darren. It’s not that Andrew was better looking than them. He was really just an average little boy; in good shape, lean and firm, except for a bit of swell to his belly that wasn’t chubbiness, but just a healthy boy getting ready to grow. It was that he was new and was offering himself up freely, not just to my gaze, but I was about to spank him. Not just a few moderately playful smacks as part of a game, but a real spanking! I stared for just a minute, enjoying the view, but wanted to get down to the main attraction.

"You," I had to stop and clear my throat and still felt choked when I spoke again. "You know what you did wrong, so I don’t need to lecture you, do I?"

He shook his head, obviously torn between liking this elegant solution and being scared of the actual method.

"Then let’s get you over my lap."

I reached out and took his thighs, but he backed up from me.

"But you don’t have the ruler."

I paused for a second, then realized what he meant. "Is that what your daddy spanks you with?"

He nodded, and I thought a second before replying. "Stay there, I’ll be right back."

It was barely a minute before I came back from the scrap heap with several pieces of wood. I held them out for him to examine.

"Are any of these about right?"

He looked for a second, then pointed at one. If the paddle his dad used was like the one he picked out, it was certainly bigger than my school ruler. It was only later that I learned they’d once made things much sturdier, and some of those things were still around, being put to one purpose or another. I picked up the one he’d indicated and ran my hand down it, then put it aside.

"That one’s rough. You don’t want to get splinters." I looked for another second, then picked up one that was just slightly bigger. It proved to be smooth. "How ‘bout this one?"

"It’s big…." he replied hesitantly.

"Yeah, but I’ll bet your daddy’s bigger than me, so that’ll be okay. Right?"

He nodded, so I sat down. Without my having to say anything else, he shuffled over to my side, climbed up so he was kneeling on the boxes, then let me help him over my lap.

I have to admit I was entranced. His little bottom was round and full. I’d had Matt and Darren both in this position, but only for games. Now I was about to give this little fellow a real spanking. I couldn’t resist seeing how it felt, and transferred the makeshift paddle to my left hand, so I could run my right over his firm, smooth cheeks. It was so warm, soft and pliable, yet with hard, boyish muscle beneath it.

I don’t know how long I sat there like that, lost in the sensation and the idea that this bottom was mine—Andrew was giving it to me to spank for him, but he finally, questioningly and nervously, asked, "Jack?"

Jerked back to reality, I lifted my hand. "Were you thinking about why you need this spanking?"

"Yes, sir."

"You know stealing’s wrong and you’re never going to do it again; are you?"

"No, sir."

"Then we need to spank you now, so you’ll remember that, and so you can be a good boy again; don’t we?"

"Yes, sir."

I’d switched the paddle back to my right hand and now cracked it down across his bottom. The first swats were tentative. He lay there, taking them, quiet and still, and they barely pinkened his bottom. I tried a little harder and then harder yet, until each smack was leaving a rosy trail across his cheeks. I knew I was doing it hard enough because he started to yelp and squirm each time the little board bit down upon his bottom.

I had no idea what I was really doing. While I’d been able to watch plenty of spankings, almost all of them were either just after I’d had my own bottom toasted or while I was awaiting my turn. Concerns like that tended to distract me from the appreciation of the spanker’s technique. Still, I knew I needed to leave Andrew’s whole bottom and upper legs hot and aching so he’d know he’d really been spanked, and I went to work towards that goal with a happy vengeance.

I tried to make everything red, but I knew that the lowest part of his bottom and his legs were going to feel it most. While I made sure to get the upper slopes and sides of each cheek a nice red, I concentrated on those stingiest spots. He was certainly showing his appreciation for my efforts in the same way I usually did; his little squirms with each spank quickly became constant wriggling and his feet began to kick up and down. His yelps became occasional sobs, then constant, before building to full blown crying. I glanced up to see his head thrashing around, his arms stretched above him, his hands wringing together, only occasionally breaking apart to slap against the boxes on which we sat.

Finally, he couldn’t stand it any longer. He wasn’t squirming any harder, but his crying was suddenly broken by pleas. "I’m sorry. Please stop. I be good, Daddy. I be good!" he promised anything for another few seconds until he couldn’t catch enough breath to continue begging.

Even as he was pleading, his hand shot behind him. I only paused a second to grab it and force it down against his hip. I knew he’d almost had enough, but also knew that if he could still talk, he hadn’t quite had enough yet (I was as sure of that as scores of sore bottoms over the years could make me). When he started to beg, I ignored the rest of his bottom and began landing rapid fire swats against the fold of his legs and he lost all his vocabulary, only able to lie there and wail.

Part of me wanted to keep going, but, as he drew breath for another cry of misery, I managed to drop the paddle. As soon as he felt the spanking stop, he shoved himself off my lap, stumbling over the cloth wrapped around his ankles. His dance was wild and energetic, though hobbled by his pants and shorts. Then, after a moment of jumping around and rubbing, his eyes fastened on me, and he launched himself at me.

I never had the chance to even think of defending myself before his arms were wrapped hard around me and his wet, snotty face was shoved up against my soft, flannel shirt again. I held him like that for a bit. When he began to calm, he let loose just enough to climb into my lap. Then he sat, one arm still around me, the other shoving a thumb into his mouth.

Though my lap was very uncomfortable at the time (and I really wished I could feel the heat coming off his bottom a bit more directly), I let him stay there as long as he wanted.

I don’t know how much time passed; though his sobs had faded, his tears started to dry, and the fire died down before he finally sat up. I helped him to his feet, and he looked at me in a way I couldn’t quite read but can only guess was respect and awe mingling with fear and thanks. "That was harder than my daddy does it," he informed me at last.

"Stealing is pretty serious," I reminded him.

He nodded thoughtfully, then added, "I deserved it."

I nodded back at him, then saw him shiver.

"You’d better get dressed before you catch a cold," I pointed out.

He shivered again, then smiled. "I dunno," he replied, then reached behind him to gently rub his bottom, "I’m still pretty warm."

I smiled back at him, but sat back to watch, a weird contentment stealing over me, as he dressed.



I did find a few soda bottles that afternoon, enough to buy a couple of comics. When I got home, though, I couldn’t concentrate on them. I was lying on my bed, trying to read, but my thoughts kept drifting back to that afternoon. My whole body was tense and tingly in a way that was weird and almost scary, and I couldn’t understand it. I finally drifted off into a long nap, and felt more normal when I awoke, though thoughts of Andrew would still sneak into my mind for days after. It was only years later that I started to make connections between spanking and the feelings I’d had that day and understood why I’d reacted that way.

And Andrew? We didn’t become friends and I really don’t remember seeing him after that Christmas holiday. There was one more encounter with him during that holiday, though.

It was New Year’s Day, just two days before the next phase of our imprisonment began, and I was riding over to see who was home and what there was to do. I was a couple of blocks from where the construction was when I heard my name called. I didn’t recognize the voice but stopped and looked.

Standing, so he could pump harder, Andrew was charging towards me, full-tilt, and did a little side slide to brake as he came up next to me on a shiny new BMX trail bike.

"It worked, Jack. It worked! Look what Santa gave me!"

I guess that was a gift that gave to both of us.





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