Nutcracker is finished, and Christmas is on the horizon!
Here's what I'm currently working on, trying to finish, or at least determinedly not abandoning:
SUCCESSES
Look at that Mouse King army, all sewn and stuffed, labeled with ribbons that read "Team Mouse 2023," and ready to be wrapped and handed off to a corps of little mouselings!
I sewed these mini Mouse King stuffies from the Nutcracker stuffies fabric that my teenager designed a couple of years ago. I also sewed a complete set of the mini stuffies for the teenager so she could hang them on our Christmas tree... but it turns out that the performance casting document that the ballet department sent out to the parents omitted one kid's name from the Mouse corps, and therefore I was short exactly one Mouse King!
Obviously, the solution was to give that kid my own kid's ornament, lol.
So technically this remains a WIP, as my own teenager's set is short a Mouse King until I upload a fabric panel to Spoonflower that's all Mouse Kings, have it printed and sent to me, and then re-sew that stuffie for her. That's an AFTER Christmas project for Future Julie to enjoy...
Also in the realm of Still-But-Not-Really-A-WIP is the stocking that I sewed for my Girl Scout troop's Elf Project kid. I managed to sew it start to finish during my mending group's monthly Mending Day at our local public library--
--then the next day the troop met to wrap all the presents they'd bought for our sponsored kid and stuff this stocking. I just have to run out today and buy a couple last things, have my teenager wrap them, and then I can pack up everything and drop it off for the kid's caregiver to pick up before Christmas.
Also at that meeting, we made a pretty epic version of these gnomes, which required me to score some faux fur remnants from Joann's, dig through my fabric stash for the body and hats and noses, buy five pounds of rice, make a sample project, then walk five Girl Scouts through their own versions. We had to do some on-the-spot trouble-shooting when their bodies came out weird and none of us could figure out why, but eventually five ADORABLE gnomes are now all sitting fat and happy in five Girl Scout homes.
FAILURES
Unsurprisingly, I suppose, after all the extra holiday projects I put on my own plate, most of my November WIPs remain WIPs. I haven't even touched the skull quilt block or the weaving loom or the England travel journal since then.
That kind of project is what the cozy, relaxed week between Christmas and New Year's Eve is for!
CURRENT WIPS
I called my teenager in to take a process photo of my hands kneading this cinnamon dough for an upcoming tutorial, and while she was at it she also took a photo of me fighting for my life to keep my fuzzy monster foot slippers (I bought these in 2019 and still wear them allll winter every winter!) out of the frame.
These grapefruit slices took a LOT longer to dehydrate than I thought they would. I think I cut them too thick?
My goal is to write tutorials for both of these projects for my next couple of freelance writing pieces, in the process making a nice winter dried grapefruit slice and cinnamon cut-out garland for my kitchen.
Y'all, I only have SIX MORE LETTERS to sew to complete my niece's hand-sewn wool felt moveable alphabet! They are turning out as cute as they can possibly be! I still need to sew a carrying bag, print and laminate some sight word cards to go with the set, write my niece a holiday letter, and then pack and mail it all off to her. Do you think a Saturday mailing is too late to get it to California by Christmas?
Other remaining tasks: finishing up one last handmade-ish Christmas present, keeping an eye out for the last of the family presents to trickle in and then wrapping them, helping/prodding the teenager to finish up college applications and her Gold Award proposal, and picking my college student up from Ohio after she finishes acing all of her final exams.
After that, it's nothing but cookie baking, movie watching, gingerbread house decorating, and board game playing for the rest of the year. I can't wait!
P.S. Want to follow along with my unfinished craft projects, books I'm reading, cute photos of the cats, high school chemistry labs, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!
Matt loves baseball. I like baseball. There's baseball RIGHT THERE in Cincinnati, so why not go see it for his birthday?
Why not, indeed!
I even used my brand-new knowledge of the Roebling Suspension Bridge to get us a cheaper hotel room across the river in Kentucky, within walking distance of the baseball stadium via the bridge. And sure, I might be more interested in the baseball players' walk-up songs than I am in the baseball, but the baseball IS still interesting, and it was a beautiful night, and Matt was happy to keep me supplied with a never-ending assortment of baseball snacks, so a good time was had by all.
The next day, I took the opportunity to right one more travel wrong in our lives: Matt had never before been to Jungle Jim's!
I even brought a cooler this time--I was THAT prepared for Jungle Jim's.
When I take the kids to a big international grocery like this, I pretty much let them put whatever they're interested in into the cart. Matt and I were only slightly more selective, ahem, and we ended up with an eclectic international assortment of Traverse City cherry whiskey and Jaffa Cakes and kimchi and Pimm's No. 1 Liqueur and pinata candy and sour cherry juice and soup dumplings and tiramisu and stroopwafels and my best find ever: CLOTTED CREAM!!!
I still haven't mastered the baking of scones, but fortunately, clotted cream is also delicious on bagels.
It was a bit of a whirlwind trip, but even being gone less than 24 hours meant that my favorite ballerina had to manage the most stressful ballet day of the year on her own, with nothing more than my screenshots of the schedule and phone call reminders and text reminders and reminders to text ME and a little light stalking on Life360 to assist her:
Fortunately, everything went great even without her Smother Mother in the same state, and in next month's world premiere of the local university's brand-new staging of The Nutcracker, you'll find my favorite ballerina 1) leading the mouse brigade and 2) dancing under Mother Ginger's metaphorical skirts.
I'm told that the mice might be wielding sporks this year, and some of the Mother Ginger kids have jump ropes. I am VERY excited to see them!!
The Nutcracker battle is fought not just on the stage, but also on the Christmas tree this year!
And Team Mouse is finally winning!
I bought these super cute felt Mouse and felt Officer patterns thinking that they'd make adorable gifts for the other Mice and Officers in my teenager's Nutcracker casts. I only thought that because I sew by hand so rarely that I had completely forgotten how time consuming it is, oops!
First, you cut out all the tiny pattern pieces:
Then you figure out what color you want everything to be. I still have plenty of felt wool scrippy scraps (I just checked my gmail, and I originally bought this felt way back in 2017--definitely time to finish using it up!), and this kind of small felt figure is the exact perfect use for them. Wool felt is much more beautiful than acrylic felt, and has such a nicer texture, that it's worth it to use it in a project where both of those features are really highlighted.
Cutting out all the little felt pieces wasn't super fun because I was too cheap to go out and buy a proper pair of tiny scissors, but I did get to use my favorite heat-erasable Frixion pens to trace most of the patterns, and that's never not thrilling:
Finally, just spend a million hours hand-stitching the cutest little Mouse Soldier in the world!
Um, I did NOT end up making felt Mice and Officers for every kid in my kid's casts. I did make a different present for just the Team Mouse kids, but it was a lot quicker and easier than hand-sewn felt ornaments!
I do think this sewing would go a lot more quickly the second time, now that I know what I'm doing, and I DO have another Mouse and an Officer already cut out and ready to go. Frankly, though, I think I need to have an appointment with my optometrist first, because I'm not sure I've got the eyes for hand-sewing anymore...
Another Nutcracker season is done and dusted! My anxiety eye twitch hasn't yet gotten the news, nor has my brain at approximately 3:00 every morning, but any moment now I'm sure all the stress of that most stressful week of the year will just magically drain away and leave me ready for some relaxing holiday cheer.
A sampling of the week's greatest triumphs and greatest WTFs:
I found out that the wig department has been having children share wigs, and that this has apparently been going on for YEARS. How on earth there is not a ballet program-wide lice outbreak every single December is beyond me, although the semester does end less than a week after the show wraps, so maybe parents never connect the dots as to why their kid suddenly has lice two weeks before Christmas.
When the kid playing Fritz in all performances and with no understudy got sick midway through the third of five performances, another kid had to step into the role with zero prior rehearsals, and that kid freaking NAILED it. The kid's wig was terrible, though. All the kid wigs are terrible.
The weirdest thing that happened, though, was the Thursday evening premiere performance. I dropped my kid off for her warm-up class, then figured I'd walk around campus for a while, get a little exercise before sitting down for two hours.
My walk, though, was super weird. Normally, the university campus is bright and welcoming, and I've spent tons of evenings moseying along the paths around the buildings and through the woods and by the creek while feeling safe as houses. But on this night, campus most strongly resembled the opening seven minutes of a horror movie. I'd be walking along a brightly-lit path, then take another step and be in a pool of absolute darkness. Thirty feet ahead the lamps would be lit just like normal, then turn a corner and suddenly I was thrust back into darkness. I took my entire walk, but I was definitely about to be murdered by ghost-wolves or skeleton creek pirates the entire time.
I circled back to the parking garage to drop off my headphones and collect my ticket, then headed over to the theater. But it just kept being weird! As I was walking out of the theater's parking garage, whole well-dressed families kept walking in, clearly having just left that same theater. Was there some kind of early sensory-friendly Nutcracker for children that had just ended, I wondered? And maybe I didn't know about it because they didn't need their starring dancers, Mouse #2 or Officer #5?
Had... I lost time? Was I, in fact, having a mental break? Had the ghost-wolves put me in a trance every time I walked through their darkened domain? Because indeed, the front of the theater was PACKED with people, all leaving.
As I reached the theater, confused and wondering if I was safe to drive home or if my kid had brought her license or if I needed to call Matt and tell him I might have had a seizure and he needed to come get us, an usher popped her head out of the closest door and said, "Hi, are you here to see The Nutcracker?"
"Um, yes?" I said.
"It's been cancelled."
In that moment I was a parody of teenager textspeak, because I literally said, "Wut."
The bemused usher just sort of gestured around and said, "There's a power outage?"
And that was the moment that I actually looked at my own environment and noticed that oh, yes, there WAS a power outage! The theater was dark! No marquee lights, no spotlight on the two-storey Nutcracker statue in the lobby, DUH no street lights! I'd actually dropped my precious child off at a darkened theater and hadn't even noticed, had been walking in and out of the zone of the power outage for an hour and hadn't noticed the occasional building with blackened windows.
I went down to the basement to find my kid, forgetting that I own a pocket flashlight in the guise of a cell phone but still somehow by the grace of god not falling down a completely black flight of steps--yay, me!--to find SO many sobbing Soldiers and Angels at the check-out table, poor babies. My own kid was well enough, happy to have the assurance of the department that they'd find a way to re-run this canceled show.
And they did!
My teenager danced her heart out in all five performances, as well, this year, dividing her time between Team Mouse--
--and an Officer in the Nutcracker's army:
Neither role is meant to be particularly showy or special, but still. When you're an Officer, after all, you get to dance en pointe in front of an audience of thousands--
Suffolk Silhouette pointe shoes are the truth and the light!
--and when you're a Mouse, not only do you do a mousely pas de deux with your Mouse partner as one of only three people on the entire stage at the time (the third being that brat Clara, and all she's doing is sitting in bed so she barely counts), but you're a guaranteed kid favorite at every intermission walk-around:
And, of course, as always, the real treasure is the friends you make along the way, so even when they make you dance in pants and a coat and a hat, or a fat suit and a giant furry head, being a Nutcracker kid is still a guaranteed ticket to the best week of the year:
I chaperoned little kids backstage while getting to take an occasional break with my own kid who's now too big to need a chaperone--
--but mostly I hung out here and there, babysitting the world's heaviest ballet bag--
The kid isn't devoted to any one hairspray (I just buy her a big ole can of AquaNet seasonally), but MetaGrip bobby pins mean everything to her.
--watching a succession of curtains rise and fall--
--and having an occasional glass of pre-show wine while putting my butt in a seat for five Nutcrackers in 48 hours:
And now the kids' second-to-last Nutcracker year is over. It was messy and stressful and delightful. I love watching my kid dance, and I love seeing what a magical time she has with all of her sweet ballet friends.
Just... knock on wood for me that all those shared mouse heads are lice free, okay?
Oh, just sprawling across a bank of institutional chairs and trimming one's pointe shoes with a pocket knife... you know, as one does!
Okay, did you traumatize your children or sprain yourself side-eyeing all of the weird and troubling Nutcracker productions, and now you need to look at something nice?
Yes, I might mostly fixate on the weird ones, but there ARE tons of wholesome Nutcracker productions out there in the world. Some productions are just charming and fun, with all sketchy innuendos and racist and sexist tropes deleted--you can watch these without having have any uncomfortable conversations with your children. Some productions have made especially thoughtful choices that demonstrate true equity and inclusion and mean you get to have GOOD conversations with your children--yay! And some productions stay weird, but also in a thoughtful, empowering, purposeful way--these aren't for children, necessarily, but they're interesting and entertaining for adults.
San Francisco Ballet: The Nutcracker
San Francisco Ballet boasts the first complete US production of The Nutcracker, performed in 1944. So watching any of their Nutcracker productions would be notable, but the 2004 production, in particular, choreographed by Helgi Tomasson, is super wholesome and adorable. For a pleasant change, Drosselmeyer does not give off a single insidious, creepy, villainous or sketch vibe of any sort, and actually manages to successfully play the role of an eccentric artist who's just excited to show off the cool stuff he makes, and then solicitously chaperones Clara on an overnight field trip and gets her back home safely.
The production's conceit that Clara goes to visit the 1915 World's Fair is cute, and it makes the world showcase of Divertissements make sense. My favorite part is near the end, when the Sugar Plum Fairy briefly turns Clara into an adult ballerina so she can have a proper pas de deux with her Prince, and it's sweet but not romantic, and Clara wakes up as a child back in her bed again in the morning.
Other fun moments: the Arabian female lead popping up out of a giant genie's bottle, a Prologue slideshow of iconic 1915 San Francisco sights, and ribbon dancing!
New York City Ballet: The Nutcracker (revised 2017)
The Nutcracker choreographed by George Balanchine is iconic, and after you've watched it once, ever afterwards you'll notice in every other production you ever see parts that were "borrowed" from his vision. Ahem.
Unfortunately, part of his iconic production that's often borrowed is more of that stupid racist imagery. Chinese Tea is particularly gross, with all the racist stereotypes and unflattering caricatures that you can imagine all just sort of stuffed into one very short number. For that reason, I don't recommend the pretty widely available 2011 New York City Ballet production, available on DVD and right now via this bootleg on YouTube:
Skim through the bootleg if it's still up, if you want, to check out the bullshit costume on the male lead of Chinese Tea. So unnecessary and offensive.
However, New York City ballet revised Chinese Tea in 2017, so now if you're lucky enough to be able to see it live, it will be uniformly delightful! I've long wanted to see this particular production, and I'm not even going to tell you how often I watch the Candy Cane dance from it:
It's part of the good vibes watchlist that I pull out when I'm bummed, along with Tom Holland lip syncing to Rihanna and the "How Far I'll Go" performance at the 2017 Academy Awards.
This updated Nutcracker, or excerpts from the DVD version, pairs with one of our favorite ballet books for children, A Very Young Dancer:
I read all of the Very Young series when I was a kid, and when my own kid was, herself, a very young dancer, I checked it out for her every year during Nutcracker season. It's about a child in the School of American Ballet who plays the role of Clara in the New York City Ballet's Nutcracker. It's written very simply, from the child's perspective, with a lot of black-and-white photos that make one feel like they're really getting a behind-the-scenes look at the school and the production.
Joffrey Ballet: The Nutcracker
Joffrey Ballet seems to be very diligent about protecting their IP, so this is another production that I'm unable to find a bootleg for, nor can I find the 2017 PBS documentary, "Making a New American Nutcracker," about the Joffrey Ballet's production.
I would LOVE to watch children with different abilities sharing a professional stage and performing a role that respects and includes them. I'd love to see every production behaving so thoughtfully with their casting.
Debbie Allen Dance Academy: Hot Chocolate Nutcracker
One year when we had Netflix for a month so we could catch up on Stranger Things (something that we clearly need to do again so I can watch Season 4!), the kids and I also watched Dance Dreams: Hot Chocolate Nutcracker, and now we super want to see it live someday. Will also did a biography project on Debbie Allen around that time, and Syd took some of her free online dance classes in the early days of Covid, so we're very much fans of Debbie Allen and her non-profit dance school.
Again, they do a great job protecting their IP (ahem), but they've got some approved clips of various numbers on YouTube.
Syd would be SO excited to learn a really fun and exciting genre like step, hip-hop, or Bollywood in concert with her classical ballet classes. It's just so cool what Debbie Allen is doing for the children in her program.
Captain Kangaroo: The Nutcracker Suite
So, if you've got little kids, this is the cutest thing EVER. In 1958, Bob Keeshan made a record in his Captain Kangaroo persona in which he narrated the story of The Nutcracker, including adding lyrics to some of the numbers, and it is charming!
I didn't discover this album until the kids were too old to appreciate it, but if I'd known about it, I'd have spent every December of their baby through preschool years with it on constant repeat--it's THAT cute!
Somerville Theatre: The Slutcracker
Okay, you know this isn't for kids. But for an adult, what a way to work through the Nutcracker trauma of your youth and/or the Nutcracker trauma of your time parenting a child ballerina!
Somerville Theatre's The Slutcracker gets amazing reviews every year, and it looks like the most fun, lighthearted, irreverent spoof of everything sketch and suss in every Nutcracker production you've ever experienced.
Once again, I do have a ton more Nutcracker productions that I could drone on and on about genuinely loving, but not only do I have Mouse milkmaid braids to do again in a few minutes, but some MAJOR wig drama went down during last night's dress rehearsal and so I also, as you can imagine, have about fourteen different chat threads to maintain and a lot of roasting to do.
Happy Opening Night, Friends! May the Mouse Army prevail!
Once upon a time six years ago, there was a very tiny toy soldier bravely marching into battle under the direction of her Nutcracker General to fight off the Mouse hordes.
Several promotions later, that child soldier has grown into an Officer, dancing her first role en pointe in our local university's production of The Nutcracker. But just between us, the Mice really have the more righteous cause. So don't tell the Nutcracker General, but his Officer will be spending half her time secretly as a Mouse, menacing that brat Clara and bravely fighting her sometimes-comrades, the soldiers.
I think the Mice might have a real chance to win this year!
It's time, then, for my third-favorite holiday of the year: Nutcracker season!
Here's a Fun Holiday Game For You: Find the Weirdest and Most Troubling Nutcracker Productions
If I was still working on a PhD (if only PhD programs could be twenty years long, because it took at least fifteen years before I thought of my first original research idea that would have made a good thesis, ahem. And now I get good thesis ideas on the daily!), I would 100% be writing my thesis on regional Nutcracker productions as cultural artifacts that reveal and complicate our society's understanding of gender, sexuality, and race, as well as the male gaze when directed at female-presenting adolescents.
Particularly that last one, ahem. I thought our local university's production was a little heavy on the child predator grooming a future victim vibes, and then I watched literally any other Nutcracker ever choreographed. Most of the productions I've seen have been choreographed by men, and they seem to have a very hard time visualizing a relationship between a male and female, even one with a fifty-year age gap where the female is supposed to be, like, twelve, that's not somehow gross.
Other Nutcracker cliches to look out for include how heteronormative and cisgender are the children's casting, costumes, props and choreography; is the "Arabian Coffee" dance meant to be "sexy" or not; and how racist does the "Chinese tea" dance present? Our local university's production is pretty racist; it was only a very few years ago that they stopped putting a Fu Manchu mustache on the male lead, recently enough that I still worry every year that it might show up again.
Joffrey Ballet now also does a dragon dance, and a nearby university's production invites a local martial arts school to do some sweet moves onstage during that number.
Every November, then, in the lead-up to The Nutcracker, it's my personal mission to find the weirdest and/or most troubling productions. Partly, I just think it's interesting to see how different choreographers handle the exact same music and same basic plot. Partly, it's just me processing my sour grapes--like, sure, they make my kid dance in pants and ugly wigs every single year even when wearing that pretty party dress and having her hair in curls was her one dream and they 100% gave her height-related body dysmorphia for a while when she finally caught on that it was always the shortest girl who scored Clara, but hey, at least nobody's in blackface in OUR production! But partly, I also like to see how our various societal tropes are expressed in this one cultural commonality. You know, who's doing something different on purpose, and why? Who thought they were doing something different but it's just an even more overt expression of that same cliche? Who's tapped into a way to empower and include artists and audience, and who's actively fighting against equity and diversity?
Dutch National Ballet: The Nutcracker and the Mouse King
Many years ago during Nutcracker season, we found a Nutcracker production on YouTube that has, to date, the most bonkers plot twist imaginable: the Mice WIN the battle against the Nutcracker and take all of the child soldiers captive, including Clara's own brother, Fritz, who was commanding the toy soldier army. We were all, like, "Okay, that was weird," and moved onto the Snow Scene, after which Act 1 ends with Drosselmeyer leading Clara and the Nutcracker Prince into... his film projector, I think? There, for some reason, the Mouse King and his army appear again and this time the Nutcracker defeats him and now all the Divertissements dance while Clara and the Prince act cute and Drosselmeyer bops in and out occasionally like a matchmaking Gollum.
So we're just happily watching the Divertissements when Arabian begins with a guy cracking a whip, and then onto the stage stumble enslaved people wearing ragged clothing and chains. The male lead starts his dance, but then one of the enslaved men tries to escape and is dragged back by one leg and starts to dance this weirdly homoerotic S&M pas de deux with the Arabian lead and we all realize--OMG, that's FRITZ!!! Fritz has been sold into slavery to the Arabian dancer! He's got makeup bruises and his clothes are ripped and he's in manacles and now he's rolling around on the floor while the Arabian dancer thrusts over him and it is WILD.
Every year since, we've tried to find this specific Nutcracker, but never ran across it again. But a couple of nights ago, in a completely hysterical fit of insomnia, I was all, "This is my mission. I will not rest until I have found this fever dream of a Nutcracker." I Googled various search terms involving Nutcracker, Fritz, and "abducted," "enslaved," and "kidnapped," etc. And finally, I cracked it! Welcome, Friends, to the Dutch National Ballet's production of The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, choreographed by Toer van Schayk and Wayne Eagling. That YouTube version we watched absolutely was a bootleg of a 2011 filmed and streaming version (if your state university library has a Medici.tv subscription like mine does, you can watch it there), but at least right now you can also watch the 2021 production here.
Also notable about this production: there's real ice skating in the Prologue and Apotheosis, Fritz tries to spy on his sister while she's changing clothes, and they skip Mother Ginger entirely.
This is a fun one to watch, even before it gets super weird at the end, because the Mariinsky Ballet in St. Petersburg is famous for holding the very first production of The Nutcracker in 1892. Fun fact: audiences HATED IT! They thought, in particular, that it was so stupid to have children dancing in a professional production. Especially funny considering that child dancers are now The Nutcracker's biggest draw. The Mariinsky must have learned its lesson, because even though there are a few children's roles in this production, even Act I Masha and Fritz are played by full-grown adults acting like children. I love when they age Masha up for Act II so that she can do some proper dancing, but otherwise, full-grown adults acting alongside children while pretending to be their same age is a little Adam Sandler for my tastes.
Its portrayal starts off very comic and kid-friendly, with lots of funny noses and giant props and some pratfalls in Act I, and a low-key Voldemort-looking Drosselmeyer who obviously seethes with jealousy every time Masha and the Nutcracker Prince make goo-goo eyes at each other. Drosselmeyer also seems to maybe be in some kind of charge of the mice, who don't look very mouse-like and I really hope they're not actually caricatures of Jewish people.
To get to the actual BONKERS part of the production, though, you have to hang on until the absolute last seconds of the performance, when Drosselmeyer raises a curtain to reveal that many of the characters are actually the treats in his candy shop. Masha and the Nutcracker Prince, who'd just finished up a joyful and romantic dance right before the curtain closed, are now revealed as the candy toppers on a giant wedding cake.
And y'all, crawling all over the cake and actively eating it as the curtain finally closes ARE THE MICE. THEY ARE LITERALLY GOING TO EAT MASHA AND THE PRINCE.
My guess is that Drosselmeyer got fed up and figured hell, if he can't have Masha, might as well feed her to the mice.
Also notable about this production: the Arabian female lead is dressed in a skin-tight snakesuit and accompanied by snake puppets, and the poor Nutcracker Prince has to keep his horrifying Nutcracker mask on for an ungodly long time. There's also a DVD of a different Mariinsky Ballet Nutcracker production, originally choreographed by Vasily Vainonen in 1934, that's more wholesome than weird. Syd and I saw this in the theatre with her ballet buddies one year, and it's adorable.
New/Adventures: Nutcracker!
So, were you thinking that it might actually be easier in the long run just to traumatize your children with a terrifying Nutcracker production as young as possible so that they don't ask for expensive ballet lessons?
Well, have I got the Nutcracker for you!
Instead of casting children, let's cast adults who make big, childish movements and huge facial expressions in an uncanny valley version of childhood.
Instead of setting the scene in a wealthy household hosting an opulent Christmas party for all their rich friends, let's have Act I take place in an orphanage with a co-ed dormitory full of miserable adult-children. The grown men acting like little boys will also wear nightshirts that expose their legs to the upper thigh.
Instead of giving the kids dolls and drums and a random nutcracker, let's give them creepy shit like a ventriloquist's dummy and a working pistol. Fritz will literally shoot an orphan with the pistol, and the dummy will come to terrifying life just before the orphans revolt and one of them saws the head off of the headmaster, who is dressed in leather and wields some kind of stick... a riding crop, maybe?
Again, we watched this production several years ago on YouTube, in what must have been an excellent year for Nutcracker bootlegs, but right this second it's also available via a bootleg on Vimeo.
If you don't watch the production with your kids, it's got some interesting moments that make it pretty fun. I can't completely figure out if it's Clara's little orphan buddy or the ventriloquist dummy who eventually is reincarnated as the Prince, but regardless, he's reincarnated shirtless, and their pas de deux would be charming and low-key sexy if the full-grown adult playing Clara didn't have to keep making those weird little kid faces and gestures. The overture to Act II that's normally danced by very little children playing angels or trees is danced by adults with wings wearing pajamas. Maybe they're dead orphans? It's also fun seeing how much sexual innuendo and camp and just plain bizarreness they can work into all of the Divertissements.
In the end, Clara wakes back up in her orphanage, but who's hiding in her bed? Why, it's that hunky Prince again!
Also notable about this production: Clara gets to dance blissfully with a whole troop of shirtless dudes, and she looks like she's having a fabulous time. The Arabian and Chinese dances aren't at all racist. And the Russian dance is, I think, a gay football theme?
Okay, I thought that I was going to monologue about all of my weird Nutcracker finds all in one place, but I actually have to go put a certain Mouse's hair up in milkmaid braids and then change into my black clothes for backstage and then drive her to campus for her stage rehearsal and then go chaperone the Party Scene children during dress rehearsal while my Mouse fights a battle and then check all the Party Scene kids back out to their parents and then collect my hopefully victorious Mouse and then drive us home and then eat Pizza Rolls in bed while watching hockey and then fall asleep without washing my face, so let's talk about weird Nutcrackers again later, okay?
And if you write your PhD thesis on the subject, send me a copy!
Syd and Matt helped me make the BEST Christmas gift for our favorite baby.
I wanted to make our favorite baby a set of Nutcracker-themed stuffies to go with a board book retelling of The Nutcracker that I'd bought for her (Will's bookstore scratch-off birthday present has been a great excuse for me to do a bunch of shopping in local independent bookstores), but I couldn't find ANY patterns for anything close to what I had in mind...
... so I commissioned my favorite artist to make some!
Syd drew me five Nutcrackers on her Wacom, and then I commissioned my favorite graphic designer to lay them out in just the right way that I could have them printed as a fat quarter from Spoonflower:
And then I took over doing some actual work myself!
I matched each character up with a complementary color of solid cotton from my stash--
--drew a simple outline around each character (Frixion heat-erasable pens for the win!) and cut them out--
--and finally put each one right sides together with its backing fabric, sewed it most of the way around, turned and stuffed it, and ladder-stitched the opening closed.
I am delighted with our little set of Nutcracker stuffies--
--and I think they're the perfect size to cuddle or play imaginary games with.
Since I had to mess around with Spoonflower so much to figure out how to format Syd's design and get it published to the site, I went ahead and did the whopping four extra steps required to actually list our design for sale!
You can find our Nutcracker stuffie patterns here. The set is ideally printed as a fat quarter, but if you buy a full yard you *should* be able to get four sets? I'm in the process of testing that theory out as we speak, because I want to have a few finished sets on hand to list in my Pumpkin+Bear etsy shop, so I'll let you know! I also have an eye towards asking Syd to make one more character for the set--perhaps Fritz or the Sugar Plum Fairy?--and maybe I'll find some copyright-free graphics of Nutcracker sheet music that Matt can also make into a fabric print. I think it would be fun to back the stuffies with that instead of having to find your own backing fabric.
I have decided that the holiday between Halloween and Christmas is, in our family, The Nutcracker.
I mean, it's got all the holiday trademarks. It's time-consuming! It's expensive! Out-of-town family comes to visit! There are decorations! Children are delighted! There is MUSIC!!!
Last year, the absence of The Nutcracker put a pall over the entire season for me. This year Nutcracker is back, and I am determined to treasure every second of it.
Syd is reprising her role as a little lad in the party scenes of the ballet, and I wanted something extra festive to send her off to rehearsals in. I found this awesome Nutcracker print at Spoonflower, reworked Syd's favorite mask design to have a single front piece, and fussy cut the Nutcracker Prince battling the Mouse King to fit:
I LOVE it! It's the perfect size for this mask.
These cord locks and nose strips have been working great, although the cord locks definitely have the potential to wander away. The nose strips have a sticky back, which helps them stay in place while I sew them.
I made Syd two identical masks so that she can trade them out when she gets sweaty. The costumers will have custom masks for the children to perform in, and I'm excited to see if they'll be cute, but they're definitely not going to be as cute as this:
The boring black mask is MY Nutcracker mask, because I have to dress like a bandit when I volunteer backstage, and the costumers certainly won't be making ME anything cute!
P.S. I'm working on a Nutcracker Pinboard, because obviously it's not a real holiday if it doesn't have a Pinboard, so hit me up with any ideas you find!
Syd has been dancing ballet since the age of four. It's one of the governing passions of her life. It's the only extracurricular, other than Girl Scouts and our volunteer work, that she chooses. She loves ballet, and I love watching her dance.
Indulge me in the matter of a few photos, then. Syd's ballet program only invites parents into their classroom for one week every semester. I agree with this policy (me!!! Who NEVER agrees with anyone else's rules!!!) because Syd, at least, finds the presence of parents, in particular her own, super distracting and does not enjoy Parent Observation Week, but for me, it's the only week each semester that I get to watch my kid in class--AND take photos and videos of her!
You're luckier than my friends and family, in that here I'm only going to #mombrag with the rare photos that I could catch of Syd without her peers identifiable in the frame, an especially challenging strategy in that I highly suspect that Syd chooses her placement during Parent Observation Week to be as far from her Mom's giant camera as possible.
As if there aren't three other Moms with giant cameras sitting right next to me. She's not the only embarrassed kid, I assure you!
This is one of Syd's ballet teachers this year. She was her sole ballet instructor last year, and Syd and I were absolutely thrilled that she got her again this year, too. Honestly, out of all of the ballet teachers that Syd has ever had in this program, both faculty and college ballet majors, this college student is the best teacher that Syd has ever studied under. She is the best teacher, in any subject, that I have ever seen. She's extremely demanding but still encouraging, she motivates the kids, is quick to correct and to praise, gives each of them tons of attention, tells them stories about her own ballet experiences, and teaches them the choreography that she's learning for her own performances. She hands down leotards that she thinks might fit them. Sometimes she even does their hair. She advocated with the head of the program to cancel pre-pointe class on Halloween so that the children will have time to trick-or-treat. Every time she interacts with the children, it's easy to observe what a gifted teacher she is, and how invested she is in the kids' growth and well-being, and how she enjoys their company and really sees them for who they are as individuals. She is exactly the mentor and role model that you would want for your tween girl in the world of ballet.
Also, my kid is the best stretcher in class. Just saying.
Excuse how grainy and blurry my photos are. You would think that a ballet studio would be well-lit, wouldn't you? Well, I'm here to tell you that it most certainly is NOT.
Jazz is a new class offering this year. Syd does not prefer it, and likely wouldn't choose to go if I didn't encourage her to, but I LOVE it. They dance to music that has a drumbeat! And guitar! And a melody with words! And I usually know the words! Because it's usually Weezer!
Ballet at this time of year is even more exciting, because we are well into rehearsals for the university's yearly production of The Nutcracker. Syd will be dancing the role of a party guest this year, and although she's pretty bummed to be cast as a male character for the second year in a row, meaning that she has to wear pants and a wig instead of a beautiful dress and her long hair styled into ringlets, the silver lining is that I don't have to learn how to use a curling iron yet, and my well-practiced performance bun is a thing of beauty and majesty.
And even if she's not dancing the part that she most wants, she's still dancing--on the big stage, to the music of a live orchestra, in front of hundreds of people, and with her friends. It's the thing that she most loves to do, and whether I'm backstage or in the audience, I'll get to do what I love most, too, which is watch her being happy.
As you will likely have guessed if you've known me for at least a year, we are deep into Nutcracker season, with the curtain rising in just nine days for my little Mother Ginger boy.
Every year, I tell you that the experience is overwhelming, and then the next year Syd is offered an even more demanding role, and the experience becomes that much more overwhelming. Soldiers rehearsed twice a week, but Mother Ginger's children rehearse every single flipping day--sometimes twice a day! I am a chauffeur, and a babysitter of young ones on their breaks, and I have a bad cold to show for it. Syd, of course, thrives, loving every minute of it, her only wish to dance even more (and perhaps to be a Mother Ginger girl instead of a boy, but we mustn't dwell on casting decisions past, for there madness lies).
The Mother Ginger scene, though, is my second favorite in all of the Nutcracker (nothing can beat the battle!). I also think it's interesting how every choreographer creates a different version of the dance to the exact same music.
Here, for instance, is Balanchine's version:
This epic performance is a hip hop version!
Along with rehearsals, of course the pre-college ballet program's dancers are expected to keep up with their regular dance classes, and for a treat Syd's teacher (who, despite being only a sophomore in the university, I think, is the absolute best ballet teacher that my child has ever had. The children all adore her, and Syd has never improved so quickly as under her tutelage) the other day invited us parents into the typically no-parents-allowed studio space to watch our children's class.
I am about to show you too many photos of that class, but don't worry--I have a hundred more that I'm not sharing!
I don't know where the kid gets her grace and poise from, but it is not from me or her father. Her sister, too, runs into every doorway that she passes. How wonderful, then, to have found a program where she can develop her natural talent into a deeper skill, one that challenges her and helps her develop perseverance and dedication.
Nevertheless, I am DEEPLY looking forward to the post-Nutcracker winter break!
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