Kringle
Holiday Pet ID: 8201
My hang out: Winnepeg, MB (Canada)
Featured: Holiday Pet Pack - Expansion Pack
My mug shots …
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Here’s my story …
It started with me overhearing Mom on the phone with her friend.
‘The only way I can afford to buy them good gifts is if I work on Christmas Day, meaning I can’t be there when they actually open the gifts. Nice, isn’t it? A perfectly depressing Christmas Catch-22.’
She was pretty moody around the house, which Mia and Jake picked up on, so they got moody too. For the week leading up to Christmas, no one was really talking. They were all just keeping to themselves.
I thought I should try to help somehow. I mean, my name is Kringle. (Just to be clear, I was adopted the previous Christmas. ‘Kringle’ isn’t some kind of fashionable new hamster name, in case you were wondering.)
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Could I give everyone presents? No, was the simple answer to that. I am, unfortunately, limited to giving the ‘little presents’ that are occasionally discovered on the carpet, or the sofa, or once—particularly regrettably—in the fruit bowl.
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But I wanted to do something.
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On Christmas Eve, I went into the living room and found Mia lying on the rug, watching some dumb, annoyingly cheerful Christmas TV movie.
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She ignored me at first, but, undeterred, I climbed up her blouse and onto her chest, then sat down right in front of her face. I did a corny smile, then made an even cornier squeak noise, and this made her smirk.
‘Cute’, she said, and petted me for a while.
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Jake was in the kids’ bedroom, bouncing Legos against the wall and trying to catch them. A few weeks earlier he’d made a cool little Lego obstacle course for me, which was still in the corner of the room.
So I ran through it. After a while, Jake started doing some announcing:
‘Kringle successfully rounds the third bend, now he’s… oh, wait… he seems to be stuck in the toilet paper tube…’
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Finally, I went to the kitchen, where Mom was sat at the table, looking stressed and staring into space.
My cage happens to be in there and I know that Mom finds it calming to just watch me playing in it sometimes, so I ran on the wheel and scurried through the tunnels for a while.
Eventually Mom called the kids into the kitchen and asked if they’d keep her company while she made dinner.
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‘Do we have to?’ said Jake.
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‘Well, Kringle’s gonna join us’, Mom said, then took me out of my cage and put me on the table. She got a napkin and tied it around my neck, like a bib.
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Mia laughed and sat down next to me, then Jake followed suit, and they were fighting for my attention while Mom took out the pots and pans.
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Mom ended up not working over the holidays, and, to be honest, the kids’ presents weren’t all that great, but on Christmas morning everyone was smiling and playing around and having fun—myself included.
Anyway, that’s what happened. Was it a miracle? Did I ‘save Christmas’? Well, that’s not really for me to say…
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…actually, you know what, I think it is for me to say. I saved Christmas. There, I said it. I saved Christmas and I’m awesome.
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Story by ShadyPets.com (c) 2021. All Rights Reserved.