Baby Jesus and Baby Satan

Take your mind back to Christmas 2002. Imagine you’re sitting in a mid-sized living room. The air is stuffy and suffocating. Too many people, combined with an oversized tree, are making the normally cozy conditions quite uncomfortable. It’s Christmas and the family is getting together for the traditional Christmas pageant. All the children are lined up waiting to be assigned parts, while the adults chat joyfully amongst themselves. The excitement is overpowering.

Twinkie#1 and Twinkie#2, the newest members of the family, are fussing. I struggle to calm them as I gather props for the children to put on the show of the year! As I gather up the baby doll we’ve assigned to play baby Jesus a young boy speaks up. Above the noise I hear, “Why don’t we just use Twinkie#1 and Twinkie#2? One could be baby Jesus and one could be baby Satan.”

Little did I know at the time how much this innocent, and quite funny, comment would affect me, and them for that matter. …

Fast forward 5 years later……

These two darling little babies are now smart mouthed little school kids and it’s amazing to me how different the two of them can be. They both came from the same womb, right around the same time, they look EXACTLY the same, and they have never been separate from each other for more than a few hours at a time (if you haven‘t yet deduced, the two are twins). Yet, they are VERY different.

One of my girls is a fatalist (this would be Twinkie#2). In her stories: Our baby has been eaten by alligators. I have been kidnapped by “bad people” and she never got to see me again. We have all died of food poisoning. Our dogs have been hit and killed by a car. Our car has hit a tree, caught on fire, and we all died. All of these stories end with phrases like, “And we never got to see them again!” It seems she finds delight in telling these horrible stories; stories of death and destruction. I can’t begin to imagine where a three year old gets these ideas.

All the while Twinkie#1 will go along with each story and then right after the bad accident she makes everything better with a doctor bringing the dead back to life, her daddy rescuing the dog, super heros coming to “save the day”, or the accidentee suddenly developing super human powers to save themselves.

I could be entertained for hours listening to their crazy, alarming, and sometimes frightening tales. If my life is ever in danger I’m just going to hope that Twinkie#1 wrote the story. I then will be able to fly away from danger and live “Happily ever after.”