Trifecta Fail

This week's writing challenge was to contain the word "melt", defined: to make tender or gentle; soften.
Below was my attempt to fulfill the challenge as directed. But my attempt contains around 100 words over the 333 max allowed by the challenge. I considered running together gobs of words in order to skirt this defect and claim that my word gobs were a intentional poetic representation of melting. But I guess the reason I participate in the challenge is to force me to write. So here's what I wrote. Call it a Double Melt Trifecta Sandwich Supreme
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"Why did Santa put chocolate in my stocking?", she asked her mother with a touch of irritation. "Didn't he know it would melt in there, so close to the fire?"

Her mother paused to consider her options. Would she accept the blame for the mess? After all, chocolates were part of the usual stocking inventory. But this year, when the girl grabbed the hollow chocolate Santa, it collapsed in her hand, oozing out of its colorful foil wrapper. Santa had been jovially laughing with a mittened hand holding his jolly belly; but when the girl let him drop to the floor to lick the chocolate off her hands, he seemed to lie there doubled over, clenching his stomach to quell the sick, perhaps after a night of celebratory drinking. Surely Santa must also feel relief when the expectations of Christmas are over. And surely Santa could share in the blame for the poorly-placed chocolate, couldn’t he?

"Well," she tried, "I guess he didn't know that mommy would make a fire so early this morning before you looked in your stocking".

Here was a compromise that allowed that it was her fault for building the fire, but that Santa, who seems to know an awful lot, probably should have known about the chocolate threat. The mother had conceded to the girl as she readied for bed that Santa would probably not descend the chimney if he saw the white-gray chimney smoke. But the temperature outside was in the teens overnight and the mother had let the fire burn.

The hissing snakes of heat that had once slithered through the baseboard radiators of the entire house were quiet this season. Instead she had decided to heat that portion of the house the two of them shared with a constantly burning fire built of wood scraps she got for nearly nothing at a nearby mill. This wasn't so odd, she had reasoned. Wasn't this how all houses were heated a hundred years ago? Plus she and her daughter liked the fire. Often they fell asleep together on the couch in front of it. Lulled to sleep by the mesmerizing flicker and crackle, the girl would slip off first. Her slow rhythmic breathing would melt the tension built over the day and her mother would soon follow her, their two bodies once again bound by an enveloping warmth.

The girl settled, "Well, he should have put the chocolate under the tree".

"I’m sure next year he will, honey", responded her mother. “I’m sure next year, Christmas will be even better”.

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