Rocking
Horse

A Childhood Dream, Sculpted Sixteen Times

The Rocking Horse series launched in 1981 with a single dappled horse — and behind that first ornament was a specific, personal source. Linda Sickman, the Hallmark Keepsake artist who would sustain the series for its entire sixteen-year run, created it from her childhood wish to have her own pony to pamper and love. The series was not a design exercise or a market calculation; it was the sculptural expression of a dream that Sickman had carried since childhood, finally given a form that could sit on a Christmas tree.

That emotional origin is what made the Rocking Horse series exceptional rather than merely popular. Each of the sixteen horses is a different coat — Dappled (1981), Black (1982), Russet (1983), Appaloosa (1984), Pinto (1985), Palomino (1986), White (1987), Dappled Gray (1988), Bay (1989), Appaloosa (1990), Buckskin (1991), Brown (1992), Gray (1993), Brown (1994), Painted Pony (1995), and the final Black with cream mane and tail (1996) — but what unites them is not the format. What unites them is the feeling. Each one is the horse that someone wanted and couldn't have, made small enough to hold and beautiful enough to keep.

The series ran for sixteen years and ended in 1996. It proved to be one of the most popular Hallmark Keepsake series ever produced — popular enough that Hallmark honored it with commemorative porcelain editions at both its 40th and 45th anniversary milestones, and popular enough that it was reimagined as the Rocking Horse Memories series in 2020. The original sixteen, however, are the foundation: the series that began as one artist's childhood dream and became a Christmas tradition for hundreds of thousands of families.

Linda Sickman — The Horse That Became a Series

The Toy That Never Gets Old

The rocking horse is one of the oldest children's toys in recorded history — a wooden horse on curved runners or a stand, present in nurseries and playrooms for centuries, given as Christmas gifts long before Christmas gifts were a commercial industry. There is something about the horse that persists across generations and cultures: the desire to ride, to be carried, to have a companion that is both beautiful and responsive. The rocking horse miniaturizes that desire into something a child can reach out and touch, can set in motion with a push, can keep when the larger dream of an actual horse remains out of reach.

Linda Sickman understood that persistence, because it was her own. Her childhood dream of a pony became the Rocking Horse series, and the series became one of the most cherished in Keepsake history because it touched something that resonates across everyone who has ever wanted a horse — which is nearly everyone who has ever been a child. The Hallmark Historian who received the 1987 entry as her first ornament was not alone: for families across sixteen Christmases, the annual Rocking Horse was the one they looked forward to, the one that arrived in a new coat and took its place on the tree alongside its predecessors, the one that, in some houses, was the first ornament to go up and the last to come down.

The series is complete. All sixteen horses are available. The complete stable — from the 1981 Dappled that started everything to the 1996 Black with cream mane and tail that ended it with sixteen years of tradition behind it — is one of the most rewarding sets in the history of Hallmark Keepsake collecting. And on the tree, all sixteen together, the color progression from coat to coat tells sixteen years of one artist's relationship with the horse she always wanted.

Tips for the Collection

• 01
  The complete sixteen-horse set is one of the most achievable and satisfying in Keepsake history. Unlike ongoing series that require annual commitment for decades, the Rocking Horse series is finite — sixteen entries, all known, all available. A collector who secures all sixteen owns a complete, closed set that will never need to be updated, and that represents the complete run of one of Hallmark's most beloved series.
• 02
  Display in chronological order to see the coat progression. Dappled → Black → Russet → Appaloosa → Pinto → Palomino → White → Dappled Gray → Bay → Appaloosa → Buckskin → Brown → Gray → Dark Brown → Painted Pony → Black with Cream. Read in sequence, the sixteen coats form a portrait of the equine color palette — every major horse color represented in miniature across sixteen years.
• 03
  The 1981 Dappled #1 is the series' rarest and most historically significant entry. It is in the permanent collection of The Henry Ford museum. Any collection that includes the original 1981 entry anchors itself to the series' historical foundation — the horse that started it all, announced as "First in a Series" on its original packaging.
• 04
  Gift the year of birth — or any meaningful year. The Rocking Horse series covered sixteen years from 1981 to 1996, encompassing the birth years of a generation of collectors. The Hallmark Historian's memory of receiving the 1987 horse "to commemorate the year I was born" is a template: the year-matched Rocking Horse is the most personally meaningful entry in any collection, and it is a gift that transforms a decorative object into a permanent marker of a specific life.
• 05
  All sixteen horses, 1981 through 1996, are at Already Christmas. The complete stable — every coat, every year, the first horse and the final horse — is in the collection. The stable is full. All sixteen here.