The Nutcracker Suite
Inspired by a popular Christmas ballet,
these
carved wooden nutcrackers are a
year round delight!
By Mary
Dessoie
Nuts have been a significant part of the
human food supply since the beginning of time, and over the
years, man has devised ingenious ways to open the shells.
Devices for opening nuts have been documented since ancient
times. Excavations of early civilizations have unearthed
nutshells which appear to have been broken by two stones when
too hard for the hands or teeth to crack. But it was not until
around 330 B.C. that evidences exists of a tool known as a
nutcracker. Possessed by Aristotle, the device worked on the
leverage principle.
Since then,
nutcrackers have a long and fascinating history. At first these
simple tools were purely utilitarian, but by the
15th century beautiful carved wood
nutcrackers were being produced. One of these, dated 1569, was
carved in France of boxwood, and depicts a man whose helmet is
crowned with a squirrel. These nutcrackers function like a pair
of pliers with two levers that allow the lower jaw to be pushed
up against the upper jaw to crack the nut. By the late
19th and early
20th
centuries, cast-iron
nutcrackers in shapes of dogs, squirrels, crocodiles and
eagles were popular.
According
to Arlene Wagner, owner of America’s largest nutcracker museum
and president of the Steinbach and Ulbricht collectors’ clubs,
Tchaikovsky’s famous ballet, The Nutcracker and the Mouse
King, was first
introduced in the U.S. in 1944. The ballet inspired such a
fascination with the wooden toy-like nutcrackers that today
there are thousands of collectors in the United States alone
and many more around the world.
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