What is the significance of the nutcracker at christmas

A novelty piece may be made of plastic, allowing it to double as a nightlight! For the sports fan, it may be painted to represent a favorite team or player. For children, famous Christmas or storybook characters can be depicted as well! By far one of the most popular ways to showcase these classic soldiers during the holidays is to hang them right on the tree!

Ornaments are great ways to bring the spirit of nutcrackers to the home without taking up too much space. Made of wood, glass or plastic and designed in hundreds of ways, everyone can choose the style that is right for their family. Whether acting out a tabletop scene from the classic ballet, complete with Clara and the Mouse King, greeting guests at the front door in regal statue form, donning the boughs of the Christmas tree, or actually being used to crack holiday nuts, this timeless piece is a holiday staple that evokes imagination, and no home is truly complete without one.

The imagery is iconic, the history is unforgettable, and the possibilities are endless. To find the best selection available, look no further than the Internet, where the only limit is the imagination. With its long beard, dashing coat, and grimaced smile, its appearance brings a familiarity to each holiday season. Read more What Is The Nutcracker Story? Select basic ads. Create a personalised ads profile.

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List of Partners vendors. Treva Bedinghaus. Treva L. Bedinghaus is a former competitive dancer who has studied ballet, tap, and jazz. She writes about dance styles and practices and the history of dance.

Updated March 10, Featured Video. The History of 'The Nutcracker March'. A Short History of Avon's Collectibles. Top Alternative Albums of the s. Guide to 'The Nutcracker' Ballet. Your Privacy Rights. There's been one for each of us every year since the day in the mids when, dress-shopping and fresh off a performance of The Nutcracker ballet, she spotted a nutcracker displayed in a department store downtown and impulsively bought it for my older brother. He found the doll too strange—that dour, almost angry, face—to keep in his room, so the nutcracker was moved downstairs and an annual tradition began.

Each of the nutcrackers has, scribbled on its underside, the name of the child to whom it belongs. It's an odd little way to trace our family history, to meander among the bright dolls and try to piece together a timeline. But it's also possible to trace a larger history through these nutcrackers, which ended up in my mother's dining room thanks to German peasants, Soviet subsidies, American soldiers, and a French ballet corps.

Tools to crack nuts have been around for a long time. The earliest written reference to the tool seems to have come in the 14 th century, and they pop up as very minor footnotes throughout European history , according to Robert Mills, author of Nutcrackers : The tool is alluded to in The Canterbury Tales.

Even Leonardo DaVinci expended some brainpower on the concept of how best to crack nuts—one solution he came up with was a large, horse-powered press. As Judith A. Rittenhouse explains in her comprehensive history of nutcrackers , for many years, no one regional version of the device became dominant over the others, though most involved the same basic machinery lots of levers and screw presses.

Design and material varied wildly—brass crocodiles in India; cast-iron squirrels in England; even porcelain elsewhere in northern Europe. At first, these nutcrackers, often made in workshops alongside carved toys and puzzles, weren't specifically Christmas-themed—though they were commonly given as gifts—and it's impossible to pin down precisely when they took on that seasonal significance.

Nuts and thus nutcrackers are a part of many holiday celebrations—Halloween in regions of Britain and Scotland was traditionally known as Nutcrack Night. The dolls symbolize good luck in German tradition—one popular origin myth, related by Rittenhouse, holds that a wealthy but lonely farmer who found the process of cracking nuts to be detrimental to his productivity efficiency even pervades German folklore! Each villager drew on his own professional expertise—a carpenter advocating sawing them open, a soldier shooting the suckers.

But it was the puppetmaker—a profession that seems to loom large in European tall tales —who won the day, building a strong-jawed, lever-mouthed doll. German homes didn't typically have more than one of the dolls, and so, during rough economic times in the early 19 th century, the region's toymakers took to the roads, selling their stuff elsewhere—Russia, Poland, Norway.

Demand increased, and by the s, nutcrackers among other wooden toys had begun to be produced commercially in factories. Nutcrackers got what would turn out to be their biggest boost when Peter Tchaikovsky adapted an E.

A Hoffman Christmas story called The Nutcracker and the Mouse King for the—eventually—famous and wildly successful ballet, first performed in The ballet wasn't immediately a hit though parts of its score were , so for years after its debut the German version of the nutcracker featured therein remained largely a regional phenomonen.