The Sparkling Promise of "The Nutcracker"

And the eternal lure of a new world.

Photo: Kazuo ota

The seats of the opera house were shaped like arms, flung open for a hug. We were facing the stage directly, so close that I could make out the individual planks on the stage. I sat with Grandma J., my stepfather’s stepmother, jiggling my legs impatiently while trying to reposition the taffeta of my dress. Grandma J.—an imperious, meticulously put-together woman who flew to Japan just to buy silk threads—gave me a stare designed to remind me what a privilege it was to attend a ballet with her, a woman who typically had no time for jittery eleven-year-olds.

This was our holiday routine: Sometime in December, Grandma J. picked me up from my house and drove me one town over to watch The Nutcracker at a famous opera house on the water. Afterward, we’d eat at an expensive seafood restaurant overlooking the bay, where she ordered fish poached in butter, and I ordered a burger and fries, to her dismay. She reminded me to take my elbows off the table and told me to place the napkin on my lap, rather than balled up in my fist. She quizzed me about the ballet: “What did you think of Tchaikovsky’s music?” I never had a satisfying answer. I wasn’t comfortable during those outings, or with Grandma J., though I knew I should be grateful for the attention she was giving me. I came to associate the ballet with a sense of formality that itched as much as the lace collars I wore. 

But each time the heavy curtains drew back to reveal the opening scene of The Nutcracker, I forgot about my discomfort. On stage, a seven-foot-tall Christmas tree rose just beyond the crystal chandeliers throwing a jaunty light around the ballroom. Children in ribboned dresses pranced across the stage, their curls flopping behind them. And there was Clara, in her pale blue gown, reaching to take the nutcracker from her godfather, Herr Drosselmeyer. 

In the ensuing scenes, especially the escape to the Land of Sweets, the ballet operates as a kind of narrative nesting doll. There are worlds inside of worlds, plots inside of plots, each promising something new—chocolate from Spain, tea from China, a thankful Sugarplum Fairy. In each world, Clara, wearing her cotton nightgown (the ballet’s shorthand for innocence and wonder), gets to sample something new. She has gone on an adventure of imagination, one that hinges somewhere between dreams and reality.

What I understood then—more on an elemental level than a practical one—was that the magic of the holidays comes not in a gift given, but in a promise of delight, upheld. It’s a sort of psychic relief not only to know what’s coming, but to have the opportunity to see the narrative fulfilled in exactly the same way each year.

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The ballet is based on a (rather disturbing) short story by E. T. A. Hoffmann called “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King,” later adapted into another short story by Alexandre Dumas. The story had to be condensed for Tchaikovsky 1892’s version, but in the original, there’s a long explainer on how a prince became a nutcracker. Subsequent retellings will sometimes include a hero’s journey and additional backstory, but the essential elements remain the same: girl, nutcracker, escape to fantasyland. It makes me think that the relationship between the prosaic and the ethereal goes both ways. We cycle through wonder and pragmatism: from a crown, to a hazelnut, and back again. In this way, we are vessels of both body and imagination. 

As a kid, I was fascinated by the idea of inter-world transportation. Oh, the places we could go, if only we could find the right key, the right wardrobe, the right nutcracker. Once, I discovered a key in a hidey-hole of one of the houses we rented. I never figured out where the lock was but remained convinced that if I could find it, my life would change. I might finally escape to a place that lived up to my imagination. The holidays brought out his desire in me more than any other time of the year. 

Florida at Christmastime is nice, but it’s not the bucolic wintery image we typically see in paintings and media. There are no snowdrifts; roaring fires are decorative, and probably likely to make everyone swelter; and ice skating is reserved for indoor rinks with their stale popcorn smells. I wanted the magic of Little House on the Prairie, Little Women, Narnia, complete with twinkling bells and woodland creatures. I lay squinting under our flocked Christmas tree and saw in my mind’s eye the flicker of lights in a 19th-century ballroom, an eye-patch-wearing Drosselmeyer hovering in the background.

When we say that we crave magic, I think what we mean is that we’re craving surprise. This is perhaps the most powerful promise of the winter holidays, as much as the guarantee of familiar rituals. People get engaged. Babies get announced. (Both happened for me around Christmastime.) We shake the snow globe and watch as the world gets transfigured into something briefly unknown.

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The older kids at my daughter’s ballet school performed The Nutcracker a few years ago, and I bribed her to come along with a purse full of snacks. I think I was hoping to recreate a new tradition, not exactly like the one with Grandma J., but one with roots in those long-ago shows by the bay. My daughter liked the Sugar Plum Fairy. She thought the Nutcracker was a very princely hero, and was appropriately unnerved by the Mouse King. But we never repeated the experience. The magic didn’t really stick for her. Maybe it’s just as well; the ballet has been plagued by (valid) criticisms of its portrayals of other cultures.

I went to my last childhood Nutcracker performance around the age of fifteen. By then, I was driving with a learner’s permit, empowered to transport myself where I wanted. Grandma J. divorced my stepfather’s father soon after that. I heard she moved to Montana and took up again with her ex-husband. We did not keep in touch. I rarely think of her, but when I do, it’s in December. I imagine the frantic whirl of a pas de deux, lace dresses that press too tightly, and napkins sitting like kittens on laps. I also think of a velvet curtain, whispering across a polished stage, offering us a glimpse into a world that intersects, no matter how glancingly, with our own. 

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A small personal note to say that holidays are joyful and holidays are hard. I’m sending you a warm hug, and a promise of hope, wherever you fall on that spectrum.

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Recent Notables

Reading

Books:

• Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead: Ray Carney is a furniture salesman trying to make a legitimate living in 1960s Harlem. That is, until his cousin Freddie pulls him into a scheme that will change the course of his life forever. A crime novel with a literary bent in a vibrant setting.

• What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About edited by Michele Filgate: a tense, stunning collection of essays from hard-hitting authors like Lynn Steger Strong and André Aciman about the secret spaces between children and their mothers. (Please check the content warnings on this.)

• Things We Never Got Over by Lucy Score: a romance novel about a woman who tries rescuing her ne’er-do-well identical twin from her problems—only to land with a boatload of problems of her own in the small town of Knockemout. Of course, there’s a dreamy, rugged barber/bar-owner in the mix, and a cast of warm, meddlesome characters.

Articles:

• “On Metaphors and Snow Boots” (Guernica): A brilliant meditation on mental illness and the cultural imagination. “There is a cost to romanticization, to needing metaphor too much. Things — people — are easier to destroy when they’re an abstraction.”

• “150+ Famous Authors In Their Writing Spaces” (Medium): Fascinating. Dude in the bathtub is living my dream. 

Loving

• Mediterranean-style tinned mackerel: Listen, I know I’m late on this, but in my defense, I’ve been eating canned mackerel since I was tiny. (My grandfather would mash up filets with soy sauce and thinly sliced raw onions and serve it with a baguette for lunch.) This version reminds me of that deep umami flavor, with a lemony zing. 

• Dorveille: a French word that describes a Medieval sleep pattern where you purposefully wake for two hours of the night, then go back to sleep. Found while reading Harlem Shuffle, where Whitehead purposefully mispronounces it as “dorvay.” 

• Social media rebalancing: I pledged with a good friend that I would only check social media for 30 minutes in the morning, and 30 minutes at night (though I try to zip in and out quicker!), except for work-related issues. It’s been a game-changer; I feel more creative and connected.

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