A Fiery Red Summer (Jenna Mcdougall and Hayley Williams)

Jingle Bell Rock

Hayley:

Snow fell outside our bedroom window. It was a sight I hadn't seen in years, a white Christmas! Living in the south meant good food and music, but it rarely snowed, it was even rarer that the snow stuck, it was almost unheard of that it snowed on Christmas. That wasn't as much of a problem for New York.

I shook Jenna awake, she opened her eyes and found me staring at her with a big grin on my face, it probably was actually kind of creepy, but I couldn't help it I was more excited than a little kid. She sat up in bed, looked out the window and realized why I was so happy.

"Do you wanna build a snowman?" she sang in her raspy morning voice. We both laughed.

"You're supposed to be Elsa, you're the blond one." I teased.

"Fine, I won't play in the snow with you." she joked.

"But you have to." I looked at her with the most pitiful face I could.

"Alright. How could I say no to that?" she smiled

We got dressed in our winter clothes, we both looked like the marshmallow man from Ghostbusters. The cold winter air nipped at our noses as we left the warmth of the house. The snow was up to our ankles, there must have been a blizzard last night because there weren't many snowflakes falling at the moment.

I took a second to take in the sight, I was about to tell Jenna something when I realized she was gone. I walked around the house trying to find her, but she had managed to disappear.

"Jenna?" I called out.

She popped out from behind the neighbors hedges and threw a snowball at me, but missed by at least a foot.

"This is war." I yelled at her.

I dashed off to the side of the house where she wouldn't be able to see me and started making snowballs. I snuck towards the bush armed with a snowball in each hand, but she wasn't there anymore. I felt something hit the back of my head.

"Sorry, didn't mean to aim so high!" she screamed from behind me.

"You should never play baseball." I cried out as I started chasing after her.

"Never planned on it" she yelled back.

She was a lot faster than me, but I was better at throwing than her and managed to hit her with both of the snowballs I had. Since both of us were now unarmed, we ran off to get more ammo. We continued our icy battle until Jenna finally surrendered.

Then we started rolling up the snow in to our snowman. Jenna made the body and I did the middle and head. Then we added stones for the eyes, nose and mouth, sticks for arms. We put on his hat and scarf, then we had to come up with a name; we thought about calling it Olaf, but he looked nothing like that little snowman, in fact it was as tall as me, we ended up settling on Bob.

Jenna decided it was time to have another snowball fight, but this time she was playing dirty, she shoved a hand full of snow down the back of my shirt, freezing me in place for a second giving her a chance to escape. I ran the opposite direction around the house, hoping to catch her. She didn't see it coming and ran straight in to me. I tackled her to the ground.

"Ha! I got you now." I cheered in victory.

"Oh no! What are you gonna do to me?" she said playfully.

I looked down at her, the snow was reflecting a bit of light on to her face making her look almost angelic. "This." I said as I leaned down to kiss her. Her lips were still warm despite the freezing air.

It started to snow more and our clothes were now soaked, we had two choices either get hypothermia or go back inside. The house seemed like an oven when we walked in. We stripped off our the wet garments, got a shower, ate lunch and then decided we should start preparing for dinner; we had invited Tay over since none of us had family to spend the holidays with.

We had bought mostly already prepared food, always being on the road didn't give us much time to learn how to cook. The only thing I figured we could make from scratch were the mashed potatoes, it sounded easy enough to do. In my mind all you had to do was cook the potatoes and squash them. I soon found out I was wrong, when I tasted them it was obvious there was more to it.

I looked up a recipe milk, butter, salt, no wonder my mom said they weren't very healthy. I didn't know how many potatoes I had cooked so I randomly added a little bit of each ingredient at a time. Jenna had a good laugh at my attempt at cooking and by the end of it I had probably already eaten half from tasting it so many times to get the right blend.

Tay came over at 6.30. Snow was stuck to her hair and clothes. It was amazing how much it had snowed, the footprints and large holes of missing snow from our morning fun had already disappeared, leaving our yard a smooth white.

Jenna and Tay heated up the food, while I set the table. The house quickly filled with the sweet smell of rolls, chicken and mashed potatoes. It wasn't the banquet I was used to having at my parents house, but it still made my mouth water and I was with good company. We ate in relative silence.

After dinner we decided to sing some Christmas carols. Jenna and I grabbed our acoustic guitars. To make it more like a typical Christmas movie scene we needed to have a fire, but with no fireplace in the house it was impossible to have a real one without burning our house down, so we loaded a video of a fire on our laptop and placed it on the coffee table in front of us.

With the scene set Jenna started strumming a song, it took me a second to recognize it, the tune was familiar, but not something you traditionally hear carolers out singing. What was it? I felt like smoke might be coming out of my ears from how hard I was thinking. Jenna must have noticed, she had a big grin on her face from trying to hold back from laughing at me.

"Jingle bell, jingle bell, jingle bell rock..." Tay sang.

I covered my face in shame. Of course that was the song. I should have known, we had even heard it on the radio a few days before.

Jenna started singing along with Tay and, once I had gotten over my embarrassment, I joined in too. We sat around, sang, laughed and enjoyed the rest of the evening together.

It turned out to be one of the best Christmases I had ever had.