Sometimes a Dog Can Be a Best Gift

“Once you have had a wonderful dog, a life without one is a life diminished.” ~Dean Koontz

I’ve never gotten a dog for Christmas. Got one for my birthday once. The many others all showed up in their own good time either when I needed a dog or they needed a home. If you’ve stopped by here before, you probably know I’m a doglover. I got the dog hunger when I was around eight. Well, I think I always had the dog hunger because I was ready to pet any dog I ever saw, but I was about eight when I began begging for my own dog. And one day, miracle of miracles, somebody showed up at my house with a dog. I was very, very happy. Since then I’ve had a long procession of dogs that I’ve loved and that have loved me. Once I started inviting them inside, they started keeping me company in my office when I wrote stories. The one up top is Oscar, probably the very best dog I’ve ever had. I still miss that guy who died too some from bone cancer. But right now, Marley, my English spaniel is snoring behind my chair and Frankie, my shelter rescue dog  that might be a lab/aussie mix, is in the other room on a different doggie bed. He’d be in here if Marley hadn’t already gotten the best bed.  This is Frankie.

And this is Marley and Frankie at the top of the stairs waiting for me to get through with whatever I’m doing in the basement and come back upstairs.

I’m not the only one who thinks a dog makes a perfect gift no matter when they might show up in your life. I got a couple of Christmas stories from readers about their pets. First we have Pat who claims to have never been an animal person, but then… I’ll let Pat tell you about it.

I have never been an animal person. I love them, but never wanted to own them because they were hairy. My best friend had a big dog and her mother had three smaller dogs all in the “very small” house. I always came home with hair all over my clothes. LOL. That was when I was very young (in my early teens. Now, I’m starting my seventies and I decided if I got a dog that was under ten pounds and didn’t shed, I could handle it. I also knew that if I went to the pound or the humane society and smelled the kennels that I would change my mind about wanting one. Well, finally my boyfriend took me first to the dog pound, but they didn’t have any small dogs. Then he took me to the humane society. They had tons of dogs and cats as well. However, the place was spotless and we couldn’t even smell of dogs anywhere. It didn’t bother me because I had a list of all the things the dogs had to be. (things like it had to be white, under ten pounds; it had to be a girl and other things that I can’t remember.) So we were looking in all the cages and I spotted this little girl and she happened to be my favorite type of dog…a Bishon Frise!! She was a pure bred, but didn’t have papers for it. Well, she wouldn’t even come to either of us or take a treat that they had in buckets hanging high on the cages. I looked at her files (they list them on the cages) and she had everything there was on my list. Every one was right on the money except she was 12 pounds instead of just 10. I figured I could handle that. Well I prayed that if it was God’s will that I get the dog, He would show me and if not, He would show me that as well. I asked one of the volunteers if I could see her out of her cage and they took me to this room and then went to get the dog. Her name was Jays, but I saw her as “Misty.” Then, after they carefully put her in my arms, she laid her head on my arm and just lay there and relaxed as I petted her. The volunteer said she was so amazed that she didn’t “nip.” Here, she told me that she had nipped every volunteer that worked there except me. I wanted the dog. LOL. I then found out that she came from a “puppy-mill” and she had no hair from in front of her legs to the top of her tail. She had some kind of problem with skin issues. I still didn’t care, I still wanted her and that was amazing from me. I was going to take care of her problems and give her a better life. …For the first couple of days, I just held her, petted and talked to her gently. Well, she is now 13 pounds and doing great. … Thanks for the opportunity to tell her story.

Thank you, Pat, for sharing about your Misty. Now we hear from Lynda about some of her favorite dog friends.

In our long marriage, we have had numerous dogs. We never went to see dogs or a dog that needed a home without coming home with one. When my husband was in the military, a Basset Hound wandered onto the base and the MPs thought he belonged to one of the generals on the base. They proudly went to the home to return the General’s lost dog, only to be told that that Bassett was not their dog, and their dog was not lost. The MPs took her back to their station, and through a series of events, my husband found out about the dog. One of the men had taken her home with him, but, she didn’t work out well with their family. Of course, we went to check her out and came home with her. We named her Maggie and she was a part of our family for the growing up years of our children. Bassets like to wander, and she had several adventures over the years , but we were always able to retrieve her. She even got arrested once when she followed some robbers into a house in our neighborhood and decided to take a nap. She also found a way to crawl under our fence and enter our neighbor’s house through their doggie door twice. We love our Maggie stories.

Maggie sounds as if she livened up your life, Lynda. Hope she didn’t have to serve time for being an accomplice to those robbers. LOL. I had to bail out one of my dogs from the pound once. Dub (nickmamed from Coffe W. Crutcher, his registered name) was a chocolate lab with a mind of his own. He had been rescued from a bad situation where he was chained up all the time but then the people who rescued him decided they couldn’t handle a big dog like him. So he found a home out here on the farm. He turned out to be a dog magnet. Every dog in the neighborhood would show up to visit with Dub, and sometimes they talked Dub into going on a walk-about. That particular time he walked too far and was picked up by the dog catcher along with his neighbor buddies on the parkway about a mile away. He took off on the day before Thanksgiving and I searched for him with no luck. I worried over him all weekend when he never showed back up at home. I called the humane shelter early Monday morning and found out he was in doggie jail. They hadn’t answered the phone through Thanksgiving weekend. Let me tell you, Dub was happy to see me that day.

Have you ever gotten a dog as a special gift whatever time of the year?