Ah, Christmas and all the other December holidays! A time of joy, happiness, feasts, mirth, convivial gatherings, and good feeling all around. In the Northern Hemisphere, it’s a time to celebrate the darkest nights of the year with light, food, music, and hope for the season, as well as to ring in the new year.
But it’s also a time of cannibals, kidnappers, horrific monsters, ghosts, torture, zombies, demons, blood and gore, and all sorts of other nasty and terrifying things. As we delve into traditional December celebrations, especially in Europe, we find that there is no shortage of tales meant to terrify right alongside those meant to warm the heart (or perhaps, roast the heart until it is well done!).
The Nutcracker is probably the most famous ballet in the world, and a holiday tradition that millions around the world love and look forward to seeing each year. In The Scary Book of Christmas Lore, we come learn that the ballet does not get its inspiration from the original story, for that is much darker.
When the Nuctcracker premiered in 1892, it was a bit of a critical flop, which was disappointing to its composer, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. He was hired to write it, and agreed to do so if he could also show his opera Iolanta as a double feature. That’s right, a ballet and an opera in one concert! The Russian tsar attended the premier and enjoyed the ballet, but critics were less kind, calling it childish and even tedious. They also insulted the dancer playing the Sugar Plum Fairy, which seems very Scrooge-y! As if that wasn’t bad enough, the dancer who played the Nutcracker later killed himself with a razor, to avoid arrest.
The story itself is much older than the ballet. It was written in 1816, and was called The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, which sounds familiar enough, but there were many differences.
The author, Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann (1776–1822), liked to write about inanimate objects coming to life, which explains the Nutcracker theme quite well. In his story, the girl is not named Clara, but Marie. She lives in a restrictive household and likes to escape into her dreams. But these are not always happy dreams, and sometimes they are filled with strange and grotesque imagery. They are more like nightmares, but she still prefers them to her waking life. In this story, she dreams of a nutcracker coming to life, and once he does, he goes to battle against a hideous seven-headed rat king. Marie is injured, falling and cutting her arm badly on some broken glass from a cabinet.
When she tells her family about her dreams, they forbid her to speak of them, so unsettling are they. But Marie protests that she would rather marry the nutcracker and live in that bizarre world than the one that she’s trapped in. She eventually gets her wish. The nutcracker comes to life, and she decides to leave with him and go off to the land of her dreams, with all of its wonders and terrors.
Alexander Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers, decided to rewrite the story in 1844 to make it more family friendly, and it was this version that Tchaikovsky used when composing his ballet. In recent years, some dance troupes have brought back some of the imagery from the original story, including the seven-headed rat king, but will anyone ever be bold enough to bring all of Marie’s holiday nightmares to life on stage?
For more dark tales of Christmas lore, including Krampus, St. Nicholas and the Butchered Children, Hans Trapp, and Good King Wenceslas, pick up a copy of The Scary Book of Christmas Lore this holiday season. Whether you're a fan of history and folklore, you love learning about other cultures, or you just want to give a holiday gift that will bring the heartwarming joy of Christmas to that lucky someone (just kidding), The Scary Book of Christmas Lore is for you!