Today, Christmas in a different way.
Even on long winter evenings, few people still crack the hard shells of hazelnuts and walnuts, when it's more convenient to tooth them already pitted from plastic bags. Nevertheless, the shell-fruit eaters are far from being forgotten. As the year begins to wind down into Christmas time, nutcrackers of all sizes and shapes, mainly for their glory and picturesque appearance, creep into the light, onto the stalls of traditional Christmas markets and near Christmas trees.
Year after year, and in some places generation after generation, they emerge from boxes and cupboards to perpetuate stereotypical notions of an idyllic Christmas. Like Clara in Hoffmann's eternally relevant 1816 fairy tale of The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, which began to win the hearts of theatre-goers at the end of the 19th century thanks to Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky's even more fairy-tale-like adaptation. After the Russian ballet began to spread on US stages from the mid-1940s, Jackie Kennedy seems to have been taken in by it, too, and as US First Lady in 1961, she decided that the Christmas tree in the Blue Room of the White House should be decorated in the theme of her choice, setting it out in an old-fashioned style with toys, birds, angels, candles and characters from the ballet The Nutcracker later that year.
Three decades later, one of America's former ballet teachers, Arlene Wagner, with her collector's zeal, made sure that the USA got its own museum of ballet dancers. "Mrs. Hestacles", as it came to be called, opened the museum with her husband George in the mid-1990s in Leavenworth, Washington State, and today it boasts more than 7 000 examples from more than 50 countries around the world. But the focus is not on wooden kings and soldiers, but also on all the other gadgets that make it easier to get to the delicious kernels. After all, the museum's mission is 'to stimulate interest in the importance of nuts in the human diet throughout history and also in the development of the nutcracker, since no other utensil or collector's item shows such a variety of shapes and materials as this one, which is designed to rub the hard shells'.
Exalted kings and humble beggars
To this day, it is the German casters that are the most popular in homes all over the world, mainly for their iconic appearance, and collectors from all over the world are also looking for them. So upright kings, bearded soldiers and horsemen, even humble beggars and dwarves, don't really have to do anything at all, it's enough to be (ornamental), to stand and be silent. Many of them, because of their diminutive size, would not even be able to shake a hazelnut, let alone a walnut. Which, experts assure us, is also due to the fact that walnuts and hazelnuts have changed a lot by now, for the sake of better production yields, so that the crunchy mouths of the wooden men who have been making them for decades have simply become too narrow and too small.
The Nutcrackers were born in Seiffen in the south-eastern German state of Saxony, more often than not by force of circumstance. When supplies of various metals began to dry up underground in these towns in the Erzgebirge mountains near the Bohemian border in the seventeenth century, they turned to wood products, first in the manufacture of everyday objects, chairs and utensils, and by the beginning of the eighteenth century in toys. A century later, wooden animals and soldiers, toys on wheels and collectibles were already being exported to the USA and Great Britain, and the designs and figures reflected a mining tradition that continues to this day.
Both the trowels and the incense burners reproduced traditional mining dress and implements, and the entrances to the mines were mapped in the wooden arches of the candlesticks. The Nutcracker was invented towards the end of the 19th century, as was the räuchermann, the incense burner, or wooden miner or woodcutter who held a candle in his belly and blew incense out of his mouth, as well as the other wooden figures that traditionally accompanied Christmas celebrations, from angels to snowmen and good men.
As Spiegel reported a few years ago, of the 2 000 or so craftsmen who make traditional wooden figures and products in the area today, around half live in Seiffen or the surrounding area. They range from small workshops to medium-sized establishments employing around 100 people. But despite the not-so-low prices - the clusters cost upwards of a hundred euros - earnings are low, as between 70 and 80 % of the product is made by hand. Moreover, it is not a piece that one buys every year. What's more, the older they get, the more exquisite they seem to be, which is why they are also passed down from generation to generation. This reduces the earning potential of the makers.
Survivors of crises, wars, Chinese fakes
The greedsters have survived economic crises, wars, communism and the flood of Chinese counterfeits, but they are threatened with extinction, mainly because of a lack of interest in the profession among young people, writes Spiegel. The craft even took part in war production under the Nazis; workshops had to make bunker chairs, grenade handles, ammunition boxes and even parts for the V2 ballistic missile.
Under Communist rule, many workshops were nationalised and almost all products were exported to the West, leaving East German buyers no choice but to queue outside two shops, and even then only a very limited range to choose from. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in the early 1990s, times were even tougher, recalled one manufacturer who travelled all over Germany to negotiate with sellers. Even now, they are constantly looking for new niche markets, whether it's year-round themes or more recent characters such as Harry Potter, Uncle Sam, cowboys and Indians, or those holding mobile phones.
Where else but in Germany, Neuhaus, also in the Erzgebirge, is home to a museum of the Hobbits, which boasts several Guinness World Records. The first was broken in 1993 when they erected a 3.86 metre working manly bull, a feat confirmed by the Guinness Book of World Records in 1994. Four years later, they became record holders with the world's largest hydraulically-powered tortoise, which has a house of its own that is almost six metres high. By the end of the 1990s, they had already been confirmed as the largest collection in the world; at that time they had 4334 examples, today they are well over five thousand.
Finally, or so their website says, a new record-breaking 10.10 metre tall one was unveiled at the first Royal Holiday Fair in August 2008, and two years later it was confirmed as the world's largest by the world's most famous record collection. Records have also been set in other directions. They have a toothpick-sized gopher, measuring just 4.9 millimetres, and a 2.65-metre-tall, 4-metre-high squirrel, weighing 590 kilogrammes, which is actually the most called upon to crack walnuts and hazelnuts.
So that is the end of today's post, and I have enjoyed it. But since this is blogmas we will read again tomorrow! So don't forget to subscribe to the newsletter so you'll have posts in your gmail inbox every day of blogmas!
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