Wooden Christmas Nutcrackers

Christmas nutcrackers, or nutcracker dolls, are figural nutcrackers frequently made to look like toy soldiers, knights, kings, and aristocrats from 15th- to 18th-century Europe, in regalia and costumes from Germany, Russia, France, and England. These dolls were first fashioned in the Ore Mountain region, or Erzgebirge, in the Free State of Saxony along the Czech-German border during the late 17th century. The Steinbach family were among the early woodworking and nutcracker-whittling artisans in the region. The nutcracker dolls were also crafted in Sonneberg, Germany, which was a doll-making center. According to the mythology, in Germany, these somewhat menacing nutcracker figures—with their large heads and bared teeth—were considered good luck charms that could scare away evil, and they became popular Christmas gifts. Nutcrackers also symbolized the cyclical nature of life and death, as they cracked the nuts that could grow into the trees that nutcrackers were made of. At the time, nuts and fruits were a typical desert course, and a beautifully crafted nutcracker made the experience of savoring sweets and socializing even more pleasurable. For these reasons, the Christmas nutcracker quickly became the subject of songs, dances, and folk tales. In 1816, German author E.T. A. Hoffman published a novel titled "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King," a dark fairy tale about a 7-year-old girl, Marie, whose beloved nutcracker comes to life at night to do gruesome battle with a seven-headed mouse king. In the end, the nutcracker morphs into a young man, marries the little girl, and whisks her away to his doll kingdom. French "Three Musketeers" author Alexandre Dumas adapted Hoffman's novel in 1845, with his "The Story of a Nutcracker," which made the story sweeter, less creepy, and more child-friendly. He also changed Marie's name to Clara. Wilhelm Friedrich Füchtner, whose family began making nutcrackers in the 1780s, was the first to carve nutcracker dolls out of spruce in 1870. Two years later, he established a company in Seiffen, Germany, to mass-produce Christmas nutcrackers using a lathe, and became known as "the father of the nutcracker," selling his nutcrackers around Europe, in countries like Russia, Poland, and Norway. Even with the machine, it generally takes 60 pieces and 100 steps to build a nutcracker before the hair, the leather embellishments, and the cords are added. The most traditional dolls resemble authorities such as soldiers, kings, policemen, miners, and foresters. In 1892, Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky debuted his ballet "The Nutcracker," which had a libretto based on Dumas' adaptation of "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King." In 1890s Russia, the ballet was not as popular as musical performances of Tchaikovsky's 20-minute "Nutcracker Suite," excerpted from the ballet. But Tchaikovsky's ballet had a second life in America in the 1940s. First, Disney animated the 1940 movie "Fantasia" to the full score of "The Nutcracker." Then, a few years later, American servicemen who'd been stationed in Germany brought home nutcracker dolls as souvenirs for their wives and children. In 1944, the San Francisco Ballet gave the first U.S. performance of "The Nutcracker," but many credit George Ballanchine's production by the New York City Ballet in 1954 as the performance that made "The Nutcracker" a U.S. Christmas tradition. The popularity of nutcracker dolls and the ballet in the United States increased the demand for Christmas nutcrackers. The Erzgebirge region where the dolls had originated became a part of Soviet East Germany in 1949. Some Eastern factories, which exported their dolls to West Germany to sell to Americans, had subsidies to make low-priced nutcrackers, but they became less well-crafted and had limited designs. Thus, the manufacturers churned out lower-quality decorative nutcracker figures that could not actually crack nuts. Fortunately, with the advent of automated shelling, the functionality of nutcrackers wasn't as important as it used to be. Meanwhile, in West Germany, a creative revival of high-end artisanal nutcracker dolls blossomed. Americans demanded dolls in the forms of familiar characters like cowboys and Mickey Mouse. By the mid-1980s, Germans were making dolls resembling American historical figures like Benjamin Franklin and modern Americans like Harley-riding bikers for the U.S. market. Otto Ulbricht's family, which opened a wooden crafts and toy workshop in Seiffen in Erzgebirge in 1928, had fled East Germany during the war and re-established the company in Bavaria. His son, Christian Ulbricht took over the company in 1968, renamed it Holzkunst Christian Ulbricht in 1978, and moved it back to East Germany after reunion in 1990. Vintage and new Ulbricht decorative nutcrackers are popular with collectors. The Steinbach family also remains one of the most prominent makers of well-crafted decorative Christmas nutcrackers, which the company carves out of fir wood. Over two centuries, they've expanded from typical authoritative nutcracker dolls to characters from German folklore, American generals and soldiers, and American pop-culture figures such as "The Wizard of Oz" characters. Steinbach, among others, have produced limited editions that are highly collectible. Steinbach's first limited-edition nutcracker doll depicted King Ludwig II; only 3,000 were made.