The Twins

A Christmas gift for our favorite horses

Emma & Sara Simmons

(1/2022) We love Christmas. We really love Christmas. What kid doesn’t? All the gifts we kids get from our parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts, and, of course, from the "big guy" in the red suit. While getting gifts is so much fun, as we grow older, we’ve come to realize that Christmas isn’t just about receiving gifts. There is much joy in giving them as well.

But this leads to one of the most challenging parts of Christmas, finding the perfect gifts for those we love. Since we are 12-years-old now and are really great at saving money, we are able to buy some of the gifts we give to family and friends. Our parents still help us, but it’s actually a lot of fun using our own money that we earned from doing chores and money we get for our birthday as well.

While it makes Christmas more heartwarming to buy gifts for those we love, we’ve also realized that it can be very challenging to find the perfect gift for our loved ones. We never thought about that before. And in our household, everyone gets Christmas (and birthday) presents, including the more furry and scaly members of our family. In our human family we have four people, but when we add in the animal members of our family, our family count quickly increases from four to twenty! We have two dogs (very very big dogs) who are easy to buy for since they just want dog treats. Our three cats absolutely love catnip. This year we got our ten normal size fish a new tunnel for their aquarium. We also have another fish but he’s in a category all by himself since he’s so big. He’s like a giant piranha! He’s not actually a finger-eating fish, but he does leap out of the aquarium to reach his food before it hits the water. We got him more food and a rock that now sits on top of the aquarium lid to keep him from pushing it off when it jumps up.

Now, this just leaves the horses. While they are Mike’s horses, we love them as if they were our very own. This is our third Christmas with them so we wanted to get something extra special for them.

So we began to think about what Wesley, Kit, and Scotty would really love to have. We thought first about food. They do love eating. They especially love apples, carrots, grain, and grass. We thought about a super big gift basket full of their favorite fruits and some gourmet horse feed. But Mike and Audrey give them these all the time and we want to do something special for them.

We put on our thinking caps again and before long, we have a great idea. We’ll get the horses an automatic treat dispenser. Yes, it is a luxury item, but we think these three horses deserve it. They treat us so well. They never throw us. They never refuse a jump. And they’ve never run away with us. Well, maybe not ‘never.’ At least, they don’t throw us very often, they only refuse a jump occasionally, and Sarah only got run away with that one time. But those are just minor details. Yes, an automatic treat dispenser is just perfect and certainly not too extravagant for our extraordinary thoroughbreds. It would have a sensor on it so that anytime they wanted a treat, like peppermints and molasses, they would just have to stand in front of it and move their heads a little and out comes their special treats. Ok, ok, maybe not such a great idea the more we think of it. Knowing how much they love treats, they would probably activate the sensor so often that we would not be able to get their girths around their ever growing round bellies. And as far as jumping, well, we don’t think that horses with bellies full of sweets would be able to make it over even the tiny pony jumps.

Back to square one. Before too long, we have come up with the perfect gift for our perfect horses. We remember hearing our parents talking recently about it being an extra cold winter this year. So, we will get Wesley, Kit, and Scotty, personal heaters for each of their stalls. Yes, that’s it. They will be nice and cozy warm while munching on their sweet hay on those long snowy days and nights. For a few minutes, we thought we had hit upon an amazing gift for our favorite horses. But then we began to have second thoughts when we remembered how the horses like to bump around in their stalls when they get bored on those long snowy days and nights. And being straight A students, we put three and three together. Hay, bored rowdy horses, heater. And what flashed through our twin minds was barn fire!! Oh no. No no no. Really bad idea.

What to do. We so want to do something special for those three horses. Then we remember that this is Christmas. And we remember the gift that God gave us that night so long ago in Bethlehem, the gift of love. That’s what we can give our horses and everyone else that mean so much to us. We can spend time with them, give them our attention, and let them know how much we love them.