2021: Festive Erotica withYour Favorite Librarian
2022: More Festive Erotica with Your Favorite Librarian
2023: Even More Festive Erotica with Your Favorite Librarian

Break out your jingle bells and socks with Santas on them, it’s time for more erotic, holiday-themed ebooks courtesy of your favorite librarian. I realise now that I’ve been doing this for three years and have never actually specified that “your favorite librarian” is, in fact, me. If that is not the case, please do not share festive erotica with your favorite librarian without their expressed and preferably written permission. 

This has been an anti-workplace harassment PSA. Now on to the reviews!

Mountain Man’s Christmas Catch by Hazel J. North

Plot: ★☆☆☆
Steaminess: ★★☆☆
Festive cheer: ★★☆☆
Best Line: “Dying between her legs would be such a sweet way to go.”
Superlative: Most Forced Resolution to Workplace Conflict

Blurb: Eloise has a problem. In order to fit in with the guys at work, she made the snap decision to tell them that she’s an expert ice fishertoo bad her boss invites her to prove it on his holiday fishing trip… with a promotion on the line! Fortunately, hunky country boy Hunter has plenty of time this Christmas to teach the sexy stranger who just wandered into the family bait shop how to reel in a fish. And if Eloise has anything to say about it, that’s not the only thing he’ll be teaching her (if you know what I mean).

Verdict: People lie in romances all the time. It’s quick and easy conflict: Maybe we’re fake-dating, maybe I’m not a duke after all, maybe you’re dressed up as a woman to avoid the corporate assassins hired by your stepbrother-in-law. Standard stuff. Lying about ice fishing for the sake of career advancement isn’t particularly sexy, but she is a woman in STEM and it’s rough out there!

Mountain Man’s Christmas Catch bills itself as in “instalove” romance, which is good because otherwise the rod-based innuendos with which Eloise ends her first conversation with Hunter would certainly count as sexual harassment. Also fortunate is the fact that her job is flexible enough to let her remote work from Candy Cane Creek (yes, really) once she and Hunter say “I love you” approximately twelve hours after meeting each other. Maybe things aren’t so rough out there after all.

(Meanwhile the fact that no one in this story has sex in an ice fishing hut is probably for the best but also a little disappointing.)

Santa’s Naughty Helper by Michelle Love

Plot: ★★☆☆
Steaminess: ★★☆☆
Festive cheer: ★★★☆
Best Line: “My own arousal is tough to subdue in my own pants.”
Superlative: Most Forgiving Department of the US Government

Blurb: When billionaire Clay Jordan is convicted of tax evasion, it looks like he’s in for a not-so-merry Christmas. Forced to play Santa at the struggling Berkshire Mall, all he can look forward to this holiday season is disappointing children with his less-than-festive demeanor. Not helping matters is the ever-constant presence of Alexis, the charity-worker-cum-Christmas-elf who’s assigned to help him out in the grotto. But the more time Clay spends with Alexis, the more it seems like she might be able to make his heart grow three sizes that day… and maybe other parts of him too.

Verdict: This is by far the most Christmassy of the Michelle Love novels I’ve read for this serieswe’ve got mall Santas, sexy elves, and inexplicably offscreen kisses under the mistletoe. And speaking of inexplicable, let’s talk about the United States justice system. Specifically, the kind of United States justice system that convicts a guy of tax evasion and commutes his sentence to one month as mall Santa, which is way more punishment than I would expect a billionaire to receive. (Also disrespectful to mall Santas. This man doesn’t even have a real beard!) 

Equally confusing is Alexis’s charity work, which seems to consist of asking for donations at the mall 24/7, an operation put into jeopardy by its imminent closure. This is sad because the mall is a “historic site”’ (which I just don’t believe), and she’d have to find an alternative funding stream (which would probably be better for her charity in the long run).

Fortunately for our leading couple, Alexis’s initial reservations about Clay start to ebb once she sees how nice of a restaurant he can afford to take her too, and then “the bank”(???) drops the tax evasion charges because they’re so impressed with his being a mall Santa for three weeks.

Happily ever after indeed.

The Krampus’ Queen by Ellen Mint

Plot: ★★☆☆
Steaminess: ★★★★
Festive cheer: ★★★☆
Best Line: “In the light, he looks more like a horse or a goat, but that ass is all human.”
Superlative: Most Likely to Make My Mother Disappointed in Me

Blurb: Amaya’s Christmas plans take a hard left turn when the father of the kid she was babysitting stings her up under the fireplace as a Yuletide sacrifice for the creature king of Christmas, the Krampus. Spirited back to the monster’s lair, Amaya can’t help but feel that there’s more to this mythical being than meets the eye; could it be that the Krampus is what she’s wanted for Christmas all along?

Verdict: Buckle up, kids. We’ve got ourselves a monster romance.

For those of you possibly blissfully unaware, the Krampus is the yang to St. Nicholas’s yin; a goaty apparition from Germanic mythology complete with hair, horns, hooves, and a twelve-inch long tongue (and you know what they say about men with long tongues). In the original lore, the Krampus spends his Christmas carting naughty children to literal Hell, or else hitting them with birch rods. Amaya’s Krampus is much the same, except that I never saw a Prince Albert on any of those early-1900s Christmas card illustrations. He’s also absolutely massive (in all senses), and not that keen on devouring her soul (though he might be keen on devouring, ahem, other parts of her). 

It turns out that the Krampus does have a child-labor mine running in his basement, but it’s okay because at least one of the kids imprisoned there did commit literal murder, and also they only stay there for a day and forgot the fact that they were enslaved by a demon as soon as they leave. Amaya decides that she’d rather remember and spends her time trying to figure out how to stick it to the guy who tried to sacrifice her in the first place while the Krampus proves to be a remarkably capable househusband.

They also have a lot of anatomically improbable sex, most of which I read through my fingers like a child watching Mufasa die in The Lion King. (Yes, the birch rods do come into play. So does the Prince Albert.)

Oh, and in case it ever becomes relevant to your own life, the Krampus’s safe word is “mistletoe.” You’re welcome.

3 Comments

  1. Christina

    Those pull quotes rocked my entire world. Thank you for your dedication to the field.

    Reply
  2. Sam

    Every year I think “There can’t possibly be more festive erotica for Annaka to share” and every year, there is.

    Reply
  3. Josh Parks

    just incredible—in every sense of the word

    Reply

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